


All Life Before Us

by awrenawry, soup_illustrations (potofsoup)



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: AU, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-19
Updated: 2019-06-19
Packaged: 2020-05-14 15:43:42
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 25,178
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19276363
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/awrenawry/pseuds/awrenawry, https://archiveofourown.org/users/potofsoup/pseuds/soup_illustrations
Summary: Happiness isn't meant to last, but they do their best.





	1. Prisoner

 

_In our vile days,_

_Grey Neptune – Earth’s ally and debtor._

_In every element, man stays_

_A tyrant, prisoner or traitor._

#### The Unknown Soldier

##### 1989

He is dead, and then he is alive.

He breathes in great sucking gasps, pulling air into burning lungs.

He doesn't think. Not exactly. Thoughts come to him. He overhears them, as he might overhear a man screaming in the next room if the wall between them were very thick. It occurs to him that once he had been afraid to die. That seems foolish. He has died many times; there is nothing frightening about death. Even the man on the other side of the wall stops screaming when he is dead.

He opens his eyes, takes in the dim ceiling with its gray-beige lattice of painted pipes. He knows this room, this facility, these people. They like to leave him alone when he wakes. As soon as he is medically stable, they give him space. It is perfectly safe. He is securely restrained. The bed is tilted and raised so that when he vomits he cannot not choke himself. They are cowards. They are afraid of him, of what he might do if he wakes up wrong.

He becomes aware of a small sound, a rustling noise like a squirrel in leaves.

He is not alone.

He turns his head towards the noise. The motion makes his already aching head boil and he has to close his eyes so he won’t vomit. When he can open them again, though, the squirrel is still there: a child, no more than five- or six-years old. She crouches beside the open door of the cabinet in which they keep his provisions.

He sees fear in her face. Her eyes widen, nostrils dilate. But she does not flinch away from his gaze, as even some of the handlers here do.

She must have ducked inside when they came to thaw him, he thinks.

She wears a shirt which must once have been white, but is now stained a dingy gray-beige like the ceiling. She’s made a pouch of it with her other arm, and cradled several packets of the brightly-colored purees they feed him in the first hours after he wakes, when his body cannot yet tolerate solid foods. They are unpalatable, but nutritious.

"What is your name, little one?" he asks.

But she only shakes her head. "There is never enough food," she whispers.

She slips away before he can find more questions.

When the handlers return, he says nothing. It is unimportant. The child took only a few packets. His body requires tremendous energy to rouse itself from death, but the cabinet is kept well stocked.

He does what they ask, so he can die again.

 

The next time he rises, more pouches are missing. She has taken the packets from the back, which are both the freshest and the most difficult to tell, at a casual glance, are missing. He knows this because he, too, eats from the back.

When he reaches into the cabinet for a carrot-colored pouch, his hand closes instead on a curious swirl of plastic. He draws back his hand and examines the object.The crinkle of plastic wrap irritates his overly-sensitive ears. A swirl of green and white. It is candy.

The man on the other side of the wall shows him how to twist the curled edges of the plastic so that the drop of candy falls free. It rests on his palm. Sticky. As though it had until very recently been carried in someone's pocket.

He bends his head toward the candy and the smell sparks pictures in his head.

He remembers the horse which drew the milkman's wagon. He remembers the velvet brush of its questing lips on the flat of his hand. The rush of hot breath. The crunch of peppermint. A sense of wonder, amazement, that a creature so large could be so gentle.

He puts the candy on his tongue. If the taste sparks any memory, it is subsumed in the bright fire on his tongue. He stays perfectly still until the candy dissolves and the taste subsides. When he moves again, it is to take another pouch of the carrot puree. The child is correct. It is the superior flavor.

#### The Itsy-Bitsy Spider

##### 1991

They explained to her how it would happen.

She is only seven years-old. That is too young for missions, they explained, but she can be of use if she can prove to them that she can be strong and still and silent, even in pain.

An unfamiliar handler brings her to a little gray and white room with two doors, deep inside the compound where there are no windows. She and the handler wait in silence. It is important that she remain quiet during the test, they told her, but they hadn’t told her when exactly the test would start.

Then the far door opens and another handler leads in the Soldier.

“The left arm,” her handler says to him.

The Soldier nods. The Soldier’s handler takes a position by the second door, looking bored.

She holds out her arm to to the Soldier and he takes it gently in his own, wrapping metal fingers around her elbow. The metal is warm to the touch. That surprises her; she expected it to be cold. His face is still, expressionless, like all his strings have been cut. It is the first time she has seen him fully awake. His face looks no more alive than he does when he is in the tank, or that halfway point between dreaming and waking, except for the eyes. They are a light, icy blue like the lake in spring and they catch at her like fishhooks.

“Now,” says the handler, and the Soldier snaps the bone in her forearm as easily as a twig.

She does not flinch. She does not cry out. She will be good. She will be useful. She will be an agent. She is glad they told her she must be silent, because she knows that if she opens her mouth at all she will vomit. She leans into the pain instead and tries to bend it into an academic exercise. Her cohort was studying anatomy when this handler pulled her away from the group. Is it the ulna or the radius which is broken, or both?

The Soldier’s eyes still hold hers, boring into her as though she can tell him something. The pain comes in waves like beating wings, the throbbing of her pulse in her ears is so loud she almost can’t hear her handler when he says, “Good. Now the other.”

She jerks her head up. That was not the test, as they explained it to her. She has passed the test. She was still and quiet, even in pain. She passed. She can go on missions; she can be useful. She opens her mouth to protest.

The handler eyes her impassively. He holds her file, a pen poised above it, ready to mark her failure. She doesn’t know what happens to the girls who fail, not exactly, but they do not return to the dormitory.

This is the real test, she realizes. They don’t need to measure her ability to take pain. Surely they have enough data on that already. The real test is her willingness to suffer it, again, simply because they ask.

She holds out her right arm.

Sympathy, she will later learn, is the name for that expression in the Soldier’s icy eyes. Feeling together.

 

#### Janet

##### 1992

It is two years before she sees the Soldier again. For her, it is in the third month of Janet. She is surprised to see him. They took him away not long after they broke her arm. But there is a mission—her first mission—so she keeps her surprise to herself.

The mission is simple. Just her, the Soldier, and a single handler. They travel by train from morning until night. They sleep in a house. She sleeps fitfully. She has never slept in a house before; never tried to sleep in a room with a window, or the sound of traffic on the street beyond, or the sound of only three people breathing. Perhaps, she is also nervous.

In the morning, though, what they ask of her was simple: she is to go into the low office building and ask to use the bathroom. When they say no, she is supposed to cry and keep crying until they say yes.

They put her in a sundress with little mother-of-pearl buttons. It is too early in the year for such a dress, but the handler says that it makes her look innocent. It does not matter if she is cold.

They dress the Soldier in the garb of a middle-class man. Innocuous, invisible. The Soldier holds her hand, as though she is his daughter. His grip is firm.

It takes only a minute. Her "father" accompanies her to the employees-only bathroom. As soon as the door closes behind them, the Soldier shrugs out of his tweed jacket and slips out the narrow window and into the courtyard beyond, towards the back of the bank on the next street. She picks up the jacket, wraps it around her shoulders, and waits. She hears the sound of a scuffle, brief, cut off by the high sound of silenced gunfire. She doubts that anyone less familiar with the sound would have been able to pick it out against the general backdrop of city noise. The Soldier returns. She hands back the jacket. She misses the warmth, but he needs it to cover the shoulder holsters. He takes the jacket, then her hand, and they walk out again together. She actually does have to pee, but that isn’t worth mentioning.

As they walk down the street towards the extraction point, the Soldier speaks. "What is your name, little squirrel?” he asks her.

He remembers, she thinks, startled yet pleased.

 _Janet_ , she is supposed to say. This is the third month she has to answer to Janet. But she has hated Janet from the very first day. She shrugs, and redirects. "What is your name?" she asks instead.

"I am the Soldier."

That answer is insufficient.

"When you were gone," she says, "There was another man in your room. They called him Soldier, too."

There is a flash of concern on his face. There and gone again so quick she is not quite sure she truly saw it. It doesn’t matter; she can take care of herself.

Their extraction is late. The business in the bank took the Soldier less than five minutes. They come to the end of the street where they were directed to wait and sit on a bench beside the corner. It makes her shoulders itch to be so exposed, but they taught her that it is best to hide in plain sight. The Soldier has her hand, still, and she uses it like a leash to tug him along. When she sits, he stoops and then sits also.

He recites,

_In every element, man stays_

_A tyrant, prisoner or traitor._

They are not his words. She knows that because she recognizes them. They are not part of her cohort's assigned reading, but she found that poem in a book in the library. She spent a lot of time in the library when the other Soldier was in his room.

"Pushkin," she says, nodding with all the gravitas an eight-year-old can muster.

"Is that who I am, then?" he asks her.

She decides to play make believe.

"Yes," she says. "You are Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin." And with even greater daring, "And I am Natalya Nikolayevna."

She darts a glance up at him, but if the name means anything to him his face does not betray it.

"Hello, Natasha," he says to her.

"Hello, Sasha," she says to him, voice equally grave.

They shake hands.

She will never be Janet again, or Mariselle, or Anna, or any of the other names they try to assign her. She is Natasha.

 

#### Natasha

##### 1999

Natasha is sixteen, although the American passport tucked into the back pocket of her jeans says eighteen and also Natalie Rushman. She feels the pressure of it against her leg with every step of the climb to the radio tower outside camp.

The refugee camp comes into view as she climbs, spreads out below the hill; sand-colored tents stretching far out to the south, the sun just now setting over the farthest hills.

Natasha revels in it. For fifteen minutes, she can be herself. They’ve finally stopped assigning her missions for children, but she isn't sure honeypots are much better. She has found that she actually prefers the crunch of bone to the flat slap of flesh. Her mission is to stick close to one of the doctors here. The letters he sends home are angry. He has seen the damage a failed state has wrought upon its own citizens. His letters home cry out for order. _Order will make the world right again,_ he wrote. They feel he might be made sympathetic to their cause, with the right persuasion, and someone has decided that Natalie Rushman is the right persuasion.

Natalie Rushman is an American student travelling abroad during her first summer after college. Natalie thinks she might want to be a doctor. She is sweet and earnest, and Dr. Albright gobbles it up. When he takes her into his tent at the end of the first month, his hands are soft and gentle and he trembles when he touches her, as though she is a prize. She wraps her arms around him and pulls him in to her and afterwards they talk about the way the world could be. She talks about a professor back at USC, and the things he believes. She is the conduit for this other man's ideas. Dr. Albright will forget all about Natalie Rushman, but he will look up this professor when he returns to the States, and then they will have him.

Until then, she vaccinates children. Assists with minor wounds and lacerations. Does all the things that a person with a few summers of volunteer experience and a hard stomach might do around a refugee camp. It is pleasant to help, for once.

The cell reception is terrible in the valley. She has to climb all the way to the base of the radio tower to get a decent signal. Natalie complains about the walk. Her parents want her to check in, she would say, if anyone ever bothered to ask. It’s a good cover for Natasha to check her orders.

Today her phone vibrates with a host of messages as she approaches the radio tower. She taps through them one by one. Slowly, then quicker.

The parameters of her mission have changed.

There is an asset close to her position, fifty miles north, in need of extraction. The asset is moving north from Mogadishu. She will intercept and drive him the remaining five hundred miles to Addis Ababa.

It’s practically a vacation.

She trots back to camp, sliding twice in her eagerness to be away. She sweet talks her way to a jeep and a full tank of gas without killing anyone.

The heat hasn’t quite evaporated that fizzy, heady feeling of freedom by the time she spots the figure waiting in the dark by the roadside at the rendezvous coordinates. She slows, stops, then does a double take. She knows this man. The road around them is quiet, open scrub and rolling hills for miles. “Sasha!" she calls, rolling down the window.

He blinks at her slowly, as though her voice comes to him through water, coming to him from a greater distance than the scrub and dirt which separates them here. It has been seven years, after all, although he looks as though he hasn't aged a day.

“Identify yourself,” he calls in Russian. She sees the bright flash of a long gun in his hand, reflecting silver in the wide beam of the Jeep’s headlights.

“It’s Natasha,” she replies in the same language. “I am your transport.”

But his expression doesn’t clear.

“I’m going to reach into my back pocket,” she tells him. “I’m going to get my passport; they gave you the name—”

In broad, telegraphed motions, she pulls the passport from her pocket and lifts it into the air. “You want me to toss it to you?” she asks.

He flicks his hands in permission, and she lobs it out the car window.

He kneels to pick up out of the dust and thumbs through it with one hand. The rifle in his other hand never wavers. He stares at the photo a long time, like it’s easier to recognize her in the photo. When his gaze darts back to her face, she thinks he recognizes her but doesn’t know if he can trust it. She doesn’t push. She tries not to take it personal. He doesn’t remember. He is their perfect Winter Soldier. He is made to remember only the things which matter, and apparently that isn’t her.

She pops the passenger's side door. He slides in, propping the gun between the seat and the door, and they drive on into the gathering night.

Sasha sleeps for the first three hours of the drive. It's rough road, but the jostling doesn't wake him. She's been learning, these three months in the refugee camp, and she recognizes the signs of heat exhaustion, minor malnutrition, too little sleep. There’s a line of dried blood on neck and another patch on his sleeve but she isn’t sure any of that is actually his. All her news is out of date. Her only connection to the outside world is mediated by the square amber screen of her Nokia phone. But she remembers a bit of chatter in the camp earlier that afternoon, about an assassination in Mogadishu; they said the general the Americans liked is dead.

When he wakes, she grabs a bottle of water and a packet of Plumpy Nut from the glove compartment and sets them on the bench seat between them, on his side of the rifle.

"More pouches, little squirrel?” he murmurs, but he takes it.

She grins, and it feels real. Natalie Rushman sloughs away.

“Hello, Sasha.”

Natasha doesn't ask where he has been, what he has been doing. Whose blood that is drying under his fingernails. She simply drives. She hasn't been in Africa long enough to truly acclimate, and while the jeep has no air conditioning, she likes how the breeze makes the humidity easier to bear. It is a pleasure to move again, to live in her own skin even briefly.

She becomes aware of him watching her. She is not a child anymore.

She spills words into the silence between them. She tells him about the doctor, and the children, and the vaccines she administers even though she knows they have gone bad. Her job is to say yes to Dr. Albright, to keep him happy and pointed towards their contact stateside. She is not here to save children.

He is silent, but there’s a weight to it which she knows means he is listening. Finally, she runs out of words.

"You remind me of someone," he says then. But nothing else. He goes quiet again after, like he doesn't know he said anything at all.

When the silence stretches, he pulls a slim hardbound volume from one pocket of his tactical vest and reads to her by the light of the stars. _Eugene Onegin_. Not any section in particular, just flipping from page to page. He listens to the hum and thread of his voice and let’s herself fall into it, losing herself in someone else's comic tragedy.

They reach Addis Ababa at dawn. She passes him off to the handler waiting there and for the first time she feels a curious hollow in her stomach, as though she has done something wrong.

#### Baba Yaga

##### 2002

Then she really is eighteen, and everything goes wrong.

There's an op. Two teams. One enormous pile of bad intel.

She comes between him and his target, and he takes the shot.

It's an ugly shot, right in the gut. She folds her hands around the pain. She knows it does nothing, but she can't stop the instinct. She crumples and folds and he shoots the man standing behind her.

She wakes in the ICU in some Romanian hospital whose name she never learns. A man brought her in, the day nurse tells her. He walked right into the ER. Cold dead eyes. It's a week before men in suits arrive to fly her back to Siberia. She hadn't been sure they would come.

The shot leaves a big jagged line across her stomach. It is red and angry and will require months of PT before she can use her core muscles again. She’ll never be as strong as she was before. She is furious at Sasha. No more honey pot missions for her, she thinks. She is memorable now. Identifiable. Damaged.

Once they have her back, she is honestly a little terrified at the lengths they go to keep her alive. They smile like her ruin is a success. What can they want from her now?

 

When Sasha comes to sit at her bedside, at first she refuses to speak to him.

He stares at her, face as blank as ever beneath long, stringy hair, but she can see the lie in it now. They haven't wiped him.

"He used you as a shield," Sasha tries. "That was the shot I had, so I took it. The mission--"

"Bullshit."

"It's true," he insists. "It was windy, and he had that knife close to your throat. It was risky to try for a headshot. This had a higher probability of success."

"Sure, but it's not the reason you shot me."

His silence acknowledges the point.

"They'll all be dead in a year," he whispers. He flicks his fingers in a way which she knows means her cohort. Five girls remaining. They will be scattering soon, like the points of his fingers. Not for quick missions like the ones they've always done, a month here and month there. Forever.

"They're good, but you’re better,” he says, and it draws her back to the present. The care in his voice cuts through her anger. "If every chance breaks your way, you might make it five years." He falls silent again, but his eyes say, _You deserve more_. His eyes say, _I want you to live_.

She understands, then, why they brought her back. Why they brought him to see her here. Why the handler stands outside the room. She feels again that blossoming wrongness.

How can he not see it?

"We don't get to decide," she says. "You taught me that."

He looks so lost. They've kept him awake for too long. His eyes are haunted. She is furious at him, but she touches his face softly before he goes. She plays the game. They don't get to decide.

 

Two of the girls visit her in the hospital wing. They come to say goodbye. Anna. Yelena. They talk of the places they are being sent. They are Widows now, and bright with the excitement of it. Natasha knows that she was the best of them, but now she doesn't feel like one of them at all. She feels old and brittle and worn out and it's not just because she can't sit up without assistance.

Sasha is right. Damn him, but he is right. She can't unsee it now.

When the handler comes to see her, she is not surprised.

"The men who had him before were fools," the handler explains, in his British-accented Russian. He has a name, but she does not call him that. His purpose is handler, and that is more honest. "They thought they could beat him into submission like a dog. But that works only because the dog loves its master. We had to make someone he could love."

"What about the others?" she asks. The other Soldiers, the other Widows. She's not sure which group she means.

He waves them all away. "Unimportant."

If this works, the handler explains, they will not need to wipe him again. It will make him stronger. They are concerned about the long-term effects of the cryo, the wiping.

After he leaves, the lights dim to signal a time of rest. She has no idea if it is night or day. For the first time, she feels trapped here, in the bunker which used to be her home. With the people and the places she loves because she knows no other.

The sensible thing, she thinks, would be to die. Not let them use her. But she is eighteen; she doesn't want to die.

And if she dies, they will not stop. They will simply wipe him again and train up some other girl.

So when the lights brighten again and another doctor enters, she tells them to bring the Soldier back.

"I'm sorry," she says. It will have to stand for everything; there is too much surveillance in the room for her to speak freely. _I am sorry I am not strong enough to die for you. I am sorry that I am not strong enough to stop them from using you._

They let him sit at rest beside her hospital bed for nearly an hour, each day he is not on missions, and when she recovers enough to resume her training, he is assigned as her sparring partner. They trust that he will not kill her.

They talk after they fight. Their hand-to-hand bouts clear out the practice gymnasium every afternoon. No one wants to get caught in the crossfire. As though they would miss, Natasha scoffs. She spits blood off the side of the mat, and wipes another smear of her blood from Sasha's cheek. When he smiles at her, there's blood on his teeth. There is probably a better time to offer herself to him, but it is his fault she isn't perfect anymore.

There are cameras here, but no microphones.

Whatever they expect of her, it is not honesty.

She explains the situation. She says to him, "They're using your—fondness—for me against you. But I don't want to die."

 _Let me be useful_ , she does not say.

Everything is a bad option, but she offers him as much of a choice as they gave her. She can't control what they have made her, but she can control what she does with it. She doesn't think they've ever used sex to control him. It has not previously proved useful. So when she leans in to kiss him, he is not unmoved. "Take it," she says. "This is what they want."

His face goes blank. Or, extra blank. The way he looks when he is remembering something they have not yet managed to fry out of his head.

He slips out of her grasp, gently. "In the mission, we have no choice. Here, we have a choice. And I choose no."

It stings. More than she had expected.

No one has ever rejected her before.

But the fingers of his flesh hand tremble where they touch her.

 

They show her files. Some of them have dates. 1973. 1969. 1963. 1958. Some of them have photos. He looks the same in all of them. That same jaw, those same few wrinkles around the eyes, though the oldest of these photos are in black and white, though fifty years have passed. How long have they kept him in cryo?

They teach her the words to control him. She vows never to use them. But of course she is not her own. They demonstrate the use of each:

 _Hold_.

_Down._

_Ready to comply._

She hates them all. She wishes she could scrub them out of her mind with bleach. But she learns them, because she must.

#### Killers

##### 2003

They kill.

A lot.

The Red Room wants their Soldier gentled, but only so he can kill more effectively. And he does. The doctors are not wrong. Two years without a wipe, and he is more stable. He sleeps through the night. His thoughts connect more often with reality. He perceives chains of cause and effect. He doesn't move simply from kill to kill, mindless. He begins to plan.

That last bit escapes even her notice until one July night in Ukraine. She's washing blood off her hands in the mark's hotel sink. There are fingerprints everywhere in the room, but that doesn’t matter. Sasha has wired the whole hotel to blow. The hands-on approach was simply extra assurance. The authorities won't be able to sift for prints on ash.

He holds up the dead man’s passport. “It’s a good match, right?”

She stares at him. Blankly. Stupidly. It is her turn to be caught off guard.

"Yes or no?"

He isn't asking about the photo, although it actually is a good match.

He has escaped three times. They briefed her extensively on the details of each attempt. She isn't sure he remembers any of them.

She says, "Yes."

The mission has failed, she tells herself. That is why she says yes. It is simple self-preservation. If she can’t hold him then the mission has failed, and she is of no further use.

She tells herself it isn't the look in his eyes, the bright, almost childlike vibrancy she has never seen there before. He looks, she realizes, like Yelena did, that day she came to see Natasha in the hospital room.

Yelena died in Kashmir.

Sasha gave her a year, but she only needed ten months.

Natasha has Natalie Rushman's passport in her go bag.

 

They blow the hotel as planned and slip past the fire cordon outside, walking towards the port, keeping to the side streets. They move as quickly as they can without attracting notice; they aren't the only agents in the city tonight. They stick to lit streets, populated stretches. That carries them most of the way to the port. They walk the rest of the way, leaning on one another like drunk tourists.

Sasha stops before a chain link fence. Beyond it is a wall of bright containers stacked like legos, orange cranes blooming over them. Sasha picks up the phone next to the gate. He gives the name of the man on the passport, and the gate slides open.

He's been planning this for awhile, she realises. He is Nicolas Davenport, a skilled hand, and she is his girlfriend Natalie Rushman. They have valid US passports. They're headed to Uruguay, a country which requires no visa. They have $10,000 cash in US dollars for a berth to share.

It is suspicious as all fuck, but Sasha has picked his mark well. The man smiles like he’s the one besotted as Sasha spins some tale about their love and his parents’ disapproval, and the suspicion tilts away from the hotel bombing and towards an illicit tryst.

Natasha grips Sasha’s arm and smiles. "I can cook," she says.

 

The container ship sails for Novorossiysk on the next tide, in the final hour before dawn.

The Red Room will not expect them to return to Russia.

They lie at anchor in Novorossiysk for a day and a night while the cranes load and unload. Natasha hides under Sasha's bunk the entire time.

Her hands and feet are at war.

Her feet would carry her back to the Red Room.

Her hands grip the slats of the bunk to hold her in place.

_"Man's choice is but to be_

_A tyrant, traitor, prisoner:_

_No other choice has he."_

She hears the lines in Sasha's voice, still.

She has been a prisoner, and now she is a traitor.


	2. Traitor

From Novorossiysk they sail down through the Mediterranean coast and out towards the open waters of the Pacific. They don't feel safe enough to plan until the ocean surrounds them. Then, it is like the floodgates open and a whole lifetime of wishes spills out. Sasha wants to keep going forever. They can follow the ship to Mexico, or maybe all the way to South America. Sasha threatens to go live in the Amazon among some previously-uncontacted tribe.

“I’ll herd goats,” he says. “I like goats.”

“There aren’t any goats in the Amazon,” Natasha tells him. “But they have spiders the size of your hand.”

Natasha doesn’t like insects, he knows. “Maybe Mexico.”

 

But dawn catches them up as they come around the Rockaways, and Sasha’s only thought is, _Yes. Here. This is home_.

It's like a scene from a movie: the New York skyline rising up and up and up, the Statue of Liberty watching over the mouth of the harbor. The height of it is even more astonishing after two weeks on the open ocean, with flat blue to the horizon in every direction.

Except, Sasha knows he hasn't seen this in any movie. He hadn’t seen any movies at all before they set out, but it turns out there's not much else to do aboard a freighter. They watched movies for hours. His favorite was _My Neighbor Totoro_ ; it was calming.

Yet the feeling that he has seen this before persists. Memory. That is what it is called.

That recognition sours his longing. Whatever he remembers, he doesn't want to know. Let it stay buried. There is nothing good in his memory, except for Natasha.

On the ocean crossing, the ship's bulk beneath him felt solid and safe. Now, in sight of land again at last, it feels ponderous in the shallow waters.

He stares at the city on the horizon.

They have American passports, but hers is compromised and his belongs to a dead man. It would be easier in Mexico, or somewhere in South America, but something about this city across the water calls to him.

It is June in New York. The air is warm and heavy, like a damp blanket against his skin even so early in the morning. Natasha hates the cold, he knows—it was always cold in the Red Room—but she never liked the humidity in Africa, either, or the tropics.

He says nothing, but he knows his eyes ask, _Can we stay?_

She hesitates, but nods.

They go ashore at nightfall. The international crew requires visas to disembark, but they are American. Sasha flings the dead man's passport into the river as they pass, but Natasha tucks Natalie Rushman's passport back into her bag, in the little pouch where she has always kept it. Any identification they gave her is useless now, at least as anything but a reminder, but she doesn’t throw it out.

They stand on an American street. Any pedestrian does. The roadway stretches in either direction. The summer heat radiates up from the pavement.

He freezes. The city skyline which drew him to shore is obscured here by warehouses. Has no idea which way to turn.

Beside him, Natasha stills also.

This is it.

They are not asset and handler. They are not Soldier and Widow. They have no set relation at all.

There is no extraction point. No next mission. Nowhere they must be. The country stretches before them for a thousand miles in any direction, and they could go anywhere. See anything. Do anything.

Cars whizz by and every one makes him flinch. Every sight, every sound is amplified. It is as though all the chaos of every city in the world has set upon them at once. It makes no sense. They’ve run ops in Moscow, Beirut, Beijing—a hundred cities bigger than Newark, New Jersey. But the power of choice sets a crawling panic up his back. His breath comes faster. He feels light headed.

"Keep moving," she whispers. "Our mission is to keep moving."

Yes. They must keep moving. They must blend in. They must disappear. That is their mission.

They keep walking, because it is something to do.

 

###

 

They’re in Trenton when the arm runs down the first time. It’s August, high summer, and they’re holed up in an abandoned house just outside the city limits.The electricity is still on, though who knows for how long. They live like ghosts. They don’t use the lights. They don’t cook. They avoid the lines of sight from the window. Every car which passes is a potential enemy. They come and go at dawn, or in the last quiet hour of the night.

The buzz of air conditioners fills the night air and Natasha lies awake, listening. They sleep in the bedroom at the back of the house, where there are two small beds and no sightlines for a sniper, even one of Sasha’s skill. The room is painted blue and the ceiling is dotted with glow-in-the-dark stars, applied without much concern for orbits or constellations or any other measure of reality. Natasha likes it. If it is true that fate is written in the stars, she likes to imagine that it is these stars, scattershot and random on a child’s bedroom.

Sasha sleeps like the dead. He sleeps like time heals all wounds, and perhaps it does, because when he wakes he looks more and more—well, human. Natasha watches him sleep from the room’s other bed, like she can figure out how he’s doing it if she just stares long enough.

 

At first, Sasha’s slowing response time is just milliseconds, barely perceptible in daily life but when they train—making use of the house’s surprisingly spacious basement—his reaction slows and slows till his left-side moves at nearly-human speeds. If she angles in from the left, Natasha can drop him eight times out of ten. From the right, she can only manage to catch him the usual one in twenty; which, she reminds herself, is still better than any of the other girls ever managed. It gives her a smug satisfaction, every time.

The arm gives her something to focus on. “How does it charge?” she asks.

Sasha shrugs. “I didn’t know it did.”

“Let me see?” Natasha asks. She always asks before he touches him, and telegraphs the move. He can be dangerous when startled.

When he places his arm in hers, she feels a curious sense of deja-vu, strong as vertigo. She shakes it off.

 

 

The only light in the basement is a square of late-afternoon sun coming through the open door at the top of the stairs. If Sasha notices her hesitation, he says nothing of it. Natasha can’t see his face clearly. She makes her hand move again and traces her fingers over the smooth surface of Sasha’s metal arm, feeling for whatever damage might be causing it to slow. Neither of them is an expert in this.

He didn’t break her arm, she reminds herself, not really; she knew that even when she was just seven years-old. He was simply the tool they had used. And the arm never troubles her, not even in bad weather like some of her other old injuries. Her handler set the break carefully and coddled her for the whole three weeks it took to heal.

“Do you remember…?” Natasha asks, but she can’t finish the sentence.

Remember is a dangerous word between them, and not one she often uses. But she feels right now like they never left the boat, like they’re still sailing on through some unknown sea, and she needs an anchor. She is Natalya, his Natasha, but who is that woman if she isn’t also the girl in the gray room, one arm cradled to her chest, but the other outstretched?

In the morning, Natasha goes to the public library. There is nothing so simple as a socket on Sasha's arm. She can't hope to find a manual. They didn't teach her anything about his maintenance. They kept him dependent on her, and her dependent on them.

"Try to remember," she urges him.

And why is it that a new future requires so much of that dirty word?

She does not want him to remember. 1973. 1969. 1963. 1958. She wants him to be able to forget. But he can't forget if the arm becomes a useless weight at his side. They can't remove it. It is grafted to the bone. There would be hospitals, and questions, and there is no one Natasha knows well enough to trust or even well enough to bribe. They must be invisible.

When the librarian smiles at her, Natasha fingers the edge of Natalie Rushman's passport. Natalie Rushman's valid passport, issued by the United States of America. She thinks of Dr. Albright, and of how many more Dr. Albrights there must be, spread across the globe. Nowhere is safe.

She selects one book on home electrical wiring and another on toaster repair. They have the best diagrams. She tucks them in the foil-lined bottom of her bag. A modified faraday cage.

They hit an electrical supply store and spend three days rewiring the house to provide the voltage the arm requires.

Sasha still can't remember anyone ever charging the arm. "They must have done it in cryo," he says. He remembers a great humming tower of electricity.

Eventually, they remove two panels with a screwdriver and find what looks like an access port. Natasha looks at him. He nods. "Do it."

She plugs in, and for a few minutes it looks like it's working. The arm whirrs, plates twisting and aligning like a cat stretching, again and again, like the load screen on a computer. The strange blue light intensifies inside the open panel.

Then the power cuts out. The neighbor's air-conditioner falls silent. A quarter mile off, the transformer pops like mortar fire.

Sasha scrambles to unplug. He hisses with pain as he pulls the wires free with his flesh hand.

"Okay," Natasha whispers into the darkness. "So, you are not a toaster."

Outside there is the sound of cars, slamming windows and doors, dogs barking.

Sasha laughs. His nerves must be frazzled. He smells a little like cooked bacon, and he's got to be in pain. But he laughs like she has never heard him laugh before. "Oh, Natashenka," he wheezes out, between bursts of laughter which seem like they'll split his lungs. "You have struck a mighty blow against the great American devil."

She laughs, too. She has to.

They go back and forth like that, catching laughter like a yawn, until the smouldering carpet sets the curtains ablaze. Natasha scrambles to find a fire extinguisher in the dark kitchen while Sasha beats at the flames with his metal arm.

She finds it, eventually, at the back of the cabinet under the sink. When she crawls out, she finds his eyes on her. Watching.

When she's extinguished the flame, he is still watching.

"You chose no," she reminds him.

"I chose not on their terms," he says. "This is—something new.”

The living room is a mess of wires and wet carpet. It smells like burnt plastic. But the bedroom is untouched.

When he kisses her, all she thinks is _finally_.

* * *

In the morning, they take the train into the city, packing into close confines with commuters and a small handful of determined tourists. Sasha's skin prickles the whole way. The man on the other side of the wall is louder than he ever has been before, but he isn't screaming. He's yelling, and Sasha is afraid that if he's quiet enough he will be able to make out the words.

 _Go away_ , Sasha whispers to this stranger in the silence of his own mind. He doesn't want whatever this man has to offer. He has a good thing here. He has his freedom. He has Natasha. Sasha remembers the other Soldiers. They brought him in to fight them each time. Once before they administered the serum, and once again afterwards. They were all volunteers.

Whoever the man is in his head, he is someone Sasha doesn't want to know.

Perhaps coming here was a mistake.

Sasha tells himself it is the extra charge still floating around his body, or the cramped confines of the train tunnel under the river. He thinks of the city and there's a clear picture in his mind. Not the picture from the ship. The skyline he knows doesn't match what he saw then.

When they emerge from the station into the bustle of midtown, it's traffic and buildings like any other city. He experiences again that frozen, agonizing moment of choice, but Natasha tugs him along. "This way," she says. She has a plan; he doesn't need to think. He can simply follow her, as he has dozens of times before.

He trots along after her while she scopes a few buildings along the park. It's an American city like no other. Square buildings and long blocks. He knows it's New York, down to his bones. Natasha takes him by several tall apartment buildings east of the Park. They stroll along the boulevard like young lovers, arm in arm.

Which, he realizes with a start, they are.

They are young lovers checking the roof for snipers. Examining every building and cross street for defensible positions. They are young lovers in search of their first home. He wants to cling to the shadows, but she knows the best way to be invisible is to stay in the crowd. Her grip on his arm anchors him dead center in the sidewalk.

It is mid-morning by the time they find the perfect building.

It rises over the park in a graceful arc, the glass turned blue with reflected sunlight. The west side touches the park. There are no reliable angles for a sniper above the twentieth floor. He supposes it is also beautiful.

Sasha glances down at his shabby clothes. He lifts an eyebrow at Natasha.

"Listen," she tells him.

He does, and he hears the doorman greeting a resident in perfect schoolboy Russian. Ah, of course. They turn back towards Lexington. He doesn't know the streets here at all. It is peaceful here. He can see the familiar-but-not skyline over the trees. The sheer mass of humanity grates at him. But the man on the other side of the wall is quiet.

They arrive at Saks. The doors open and close. People stream in and out.

He circles the block while Natasha shops. He wants nothing more than to duck into an alley somewhere and hide. But New York is a city without alleys. So he circles and circles the block, feeling too exposed and too crowded all at once.

When she returns, she has become a different woman. She's wearing different clothing, but that's just the window dressing. She walks like she's never heard of anything called a sniper, like there's nothing at all in the world to be afraid of, and when she smiles at him it is too wide and too bright. There's none of the danger which smoulders in her soul.

He doesn't like it when she does this. Sometimes he sees other places and other times. Some days he can barely remember her. Some days he remembers things that can't possibly be real. When she is not Natasha, he doubts everything.

She brings him clothes and holds them up to his body. Tailored jeans, a dress shirt. Two dark blazers; one fits, the other she chucks behind a dumpster. Dark gloves. Sunglasses. He changes in a cafe bathroom. When he steps out, she stands back and nods, apparently satisfied with her handiwork.

"Who are we?" he asks.

"You are Ilya Demetrovich, youngest son of Demetri Sokolov, oil and gas magnate, and I am the girlfriend your father hates." She lays a hand on his chest. "Just follow my lead. You look enough like him. Not the eyes," she amends after a moment, "but that's what the sunglasses are for."

All the men they've thrown her at look something like him.

Still, Sasha knows it is a good choice. He is not trained for infiltration, but Natasha flows between the cracks in security like water.

The doorman's eyes widen as they approach and even Sasha can tell they have him.

It rankles a little. He can feel the edge of her irritation. If she were the billionaire's daughter, they would call her father immediately. But he is the billionaire's son, and they will let him have his fun. The doorman slides his eyes over her hips and gives Sasha a broad grin. She smiles at Ilya sweetly--no good to be taken for a gold-digger when an infatuated idiot will do. Sasha grins back at the doorman like they're both in on the joke, and the joke is her.

Natasha wraps herself around his arm. It looks flirtatious, maybe a touch possessive, but he can feel the press of her fingers against his ribs. She signs to him the words he needs to say to unlock the apartment. It doesn’t take much. She picked her mark well. Ilya has brought his girlfriend to the city for a little fun. There’s no need to tell his father. Sasha shakes the man's hand with a hundred dollar bill.

Natasha lets the doorman see what he's missing out on and makes him think that perhaps, just perhaps, he'd have a chance with her when Ilya is done. That'll buy them another couple weeks of peace.

Ilya declines the offer of someone to collect their bags from the hotel.

They take the elevator up to 43B.

Sasha snaps the lock as quietly as he can. The door handle comes off in his hand, but he’ll fix it later. There's only one other door on this floor and it looks like no one’s been home in at least a year.

There’s a whole world inside 43B. The apartment is stocked with everything they could possibly need, all polished and stored carefully against the possibility of the family's return. All of it covered in a thin layer of dust.

"No cleaning service," Natasha murmurs, sounding pleased. "The Sokolov family lost a lot of money a while back. They're holding on to appearances, but there's no money for anything like payroll."

That money disappeared right about the time poor Ilya fell into Natasha's clutches, Sasha imagines.

There’s room after room of furniture Sasha isn’t sure anyone has ever sat on, all draped in cream canvas covers. A pantry filled with half-expired dry goods, gold-rimmed glasses, and and enough serving ware for twenty people. All the closets are hung with clothes.

Sasha follows Natasha down hallways opening doors to each room. A bedroom. A bathroom. A bedroom. Another bathroom. The last door opens into a library.

He steps inside. Natasha waits at the door.

The library is filled with beautiful leather-bound volumes, the titles on the spines in both English and Russian. The window looks out over the park, where the sun is setting. The room washes gold in the light. There's a desk and an easy chair, and it is so silent and peaceful after the rush of the streets below. He thinks, _I am never going to leave this apartment again if I don't have to_.

At the door, Natasha smiles her real smile. This peace is her gift to him.

* * *

They live mostly off the grid: no bank accounts, cell phones, nothing traceable.

Sasha answers an ad in the newspaper for technical translations into English and it brings in enough money that Natasha can stop pocketing cash from tourists; or, at least, she can shake them down for fun instead of for need.

The publishers send cashier’s checks, each to a different post office box. He uses the names of guys he meets on the streets, when he goes out at night, and he offers them a fifty percent cut to cash the checks. No one ever stiffs him, or holds back more than half.

It would be less hassle to get a fake ID, but it is better to be invisible. Leave no trace. Natalie Rushman’s passport is a reminder that even here, on the other side of the world, the people who hunt them have power.

He translates software manuals to and from a dozen different languages. He knows English and Russian and German and a smattering of Italian, though most of what he knows in Italian would make someone's mother blush. He knows two dialects of Thai and also Tagalog, Mandarin, and Laotian. He has no idea why he knows so many languages, when they so rarely expected him to speak.

When he begins translating other things—essays, poems, stories—he learns to feel again.

He likes the work of translating. It teaches him how to feel again, within the safe confines of his library and the printed page. The words and the authors behind them teach him how to be human again. He says I love you to Natasha in every language he knows but it doesn’t feel like enough. He doesn’t know how to name the sensation he finds weighing over his heart when they cook together, or when he holds her at night and listens to her breathing smooth into sleep. But he knows that these feelings have names, just waiting for him to find them.

Sometimes he forgets where he is. It feels like falling; like he falls through the floor into a different world. One moment he's walking the familiar hallway from the library to the bathroom or back, and the next moment it's a different hallway, green and white and smelling of fresh blood; there are signs on the wall and all the lettering is Cyrillic. Or the hallway is white from top to bottom with milk paint and marble floors and hand-lettered signs in blocky English capitals. The tuberculosis ward, his mind provides. He spent a lot of time there, waiting after work. Picking up—waiting for—he’s always been waiting for— But it slips away from him again, every time, and the hallway he knows returns, still and familiar., residential beige, and the only things on the wall are paintings someone else picked out of a catalog.

He prefers the library because it is harder to slide away like that, from one memory into another. He's never had a room like this in any life.

Most of the time, when he loses himself in a book it is the old-fashioned way, same as anyone else. Characters. Plot. A whole world safely contained between two covers. The feeling of paper under his hand anchors him to the pages. Every now and again, though, the feel of a particular book murmurs memories to him. _The Hobbit. Pinocchio._ He puts these in a a stack behind the door, where he can't see them at all unless he closes the door.

It is a simple life.

The closets are full of clothes they don't touch. Their bags are packed and ready every evening. But no disaster comes. It makes Sasha anxious, when he thinks about it too much. Like it shouldn't be this easy. But what they have together is good; they were made for each other, more literally than he wants to think about.

Six months pass. Then a year, then two years. Their comings and goings become familiar. Staff comes and goes, until no one who remembers their arrival remains.

Eventually, they are simply Ilya and Natasha from 43B. Who have always been and always will be of 43B. Their presence is never questioned.

* * *

Happiness isn't meant to last, but they do their best.

* * *

Natasha learns more than she ever wanted to know about electrical wiring. She breaks into the electrical room and installs a second box.

She flips the switch on a Thursday morning in February.

The lights flicker, then steady. Sasha, wedged in against two breakers the size of his head, breathes again. The arm whirrs as it had before, but there are no sparks. After fifteen minutes, the plates settle again in their usual configuration. Sasha flexes, and it responds at the speed he expects. She flips the breaker back to regular operation.

 

On the good days, the skin of her palms doesn't itch for a weapon. On the good days, they move from sparring to dancing to sex and it is enough.

On the bad days, when she can't sleep, she wanders. She rides the subway, clattering from the Bronx to Brooklyn and back. When a man gropes her on the M, she breaks his arm. She watches the crowd turn against her, their faces flipping over to horror. They would have stood with her if she begged for their help. But when she helps herself, she becomes the aggressor.

When she slides off at the next stop, a man follows her up the stairs.

“That was nice work back there,” he says. “Are you Massad? CIA?”

She just shakes her head.

“You looking for work?” the man asks.

It is a very bad day. She says, “Yes.”

* * *

He's eating baby food again. That's not an especially good sign, Natasha knows. But she also knows there wasn't any baby food in the apartment when she left, so its presence now means he's left the house of his own volition. Taken together, it's a draw.

When she slips into the library, he hides the little jar under the spine of a book. She raises an eyebrow. She's a trained spy. Is she not supposed to notice the Gerber baby peeking out from beneath the pages of—wait, what was the book? She turns her head to see. It's in Vietnamese. Maybe she _is_ losing her touch. Maybe there was baby food in the apartment when she left.

"Rough day?" he says, mildly.

She flops down on the couch across from the arm chair in which he rests. The library is all brooding mahogany and chestnut leather. Normally, Natasha hates it, but today she finds that it suits her mood.

"Traffic," she says.

"Sure," he snorts. "Lots of traffic."

"Lots of traffic," she repeats.

If it bothers him that she didn’t tell him where she was going, he doesn't let on.

"There's still blood under your nails, Natashenka."

Damn it. She knew she should have showered before coming home.

"There _was_ traffic," she says. "It delayed the target. Made things messy."

He doesn't understand the itch under her skin.

Their old handlers would laugh to see them now. Their precious Soldier with his poetry and his library. The little one, never quite good enough, who can't stop killing.

As always, he cuts through to the heart of things. "You're good enough, Natasha."

This is when they usually kiss and make up.

His hair falls softly in front of his face. She wants to gather it up in her hand, pull him close. He fits here, in this ancient and masculine room.

When she stands and crosses the rug to him, detouring to avoid the coffee table, he sets the book aside and welcomes her onto his lap. She grinds down on him, hard, feeling the biting edge that killing doesn't sate, but instead brings close to the surface. She wants—

"Go take a shower," he says. But he doesn't push her away. They usually speak Russian when they're alone, but sometimes, like now, he drops into English. She's not sure he's ever noticed. He sounds almost like he belongs here in this city, but his accent is just the slightest bit wrong. It is odd, Natasha thinks, that whoever taught him English gave him an accent, even such a slight one as this. It sticks out. It's noticeable. They never wanted him to be noticeable.

She works him with her hand until he's hard, which doesn't take long, and then she rides him, snapping her hips to feel him in her. Taking her own pleasure from him. He lies still beneath her. Exercising all that control. It drives her crazy. But he can't control his breathing, can't stop the gasp that comes when she grinds down hard on him—can’t, or doesn't try. He is so vulnerable with her, like this, so open. Sometimes it makes her tender with him and gentle, but not now. Now, she just knows he can take it.

She rides him until she's sore with pleasure and then puts a hand to her clit. She bats away his own hands when they try to join her and they flitter away to land on her hips instead. She lets him. He doesn't try to lead her. The weight is comfortable. Even the metal warm to the touch.

He groans when she comes. She feels the contractions ripple through her and she wonders, dimly, what that feels like to him. She's sensitive after she comes, and he stays still in her, waiting, until she pulls back and lifts of him. He whines deep in his throat as she slips off him, but when she wraps her hand around his cock, slick with her own wetness, he hisses a quick, "Fuck.” In English, of course. He always talks English in bed, and his accent is stronger. This, she is certain he does not know. It’s interesting, but there are more interesting things, more pressing concerns literally at hand. She runs a finger over the slit of his cock and he bucks up into her hand. She likes that, so she does it again.

It is a joy to watch him, her beautiful Sasha.

He'd tell her to stop if he wanted, but he doesn't. He lets her play with him, hands and tongue and teeth on his sensitive nipples and finally, finally, he comes with a startled little yelp after she bites down on his ear lobe.

"I can't be like you," she whispers. "I can't be happy with this."

What he hears, she knows, is _I can't be happy with you_. But that it isn't it at all, she just doesn't know how to explain—

"You want things to be simple?" he snaps. "Go back."

The words are meant to hurt.

"You're angry," she points out, somewhat wonderingly.

The books say anger is a good sign. Like something in him is cracking free of the ice.

But they have this fight again and again, and it is not what she wants right now.

She folds him into an embrace. “This is who I am,” she says. "I am what they made me and it's too late to be anyone else. I have these skills and I can't let them go. I have to do something good with them."

His voice is softer now. If he's angry, he's angry at himself."There's no good way to kill people, Natashenka."

What can she say to that?


	3. Tyrant

#### 2009

It is a bright, sunny day in September when things finally fall apart.

Sasha pulls on a long sleeve shirt and his work gloves and walks down to the market on the lower east side. He looks like a construction worker on his lunch break, and that suits him just fine.

He doesn't like the glossy supermarkets that’ve sprouted up in midtown and Chelsea and the bodegas, with their narrow isles and attentive clerks, are too close, too familiar. It's too easy to become a regular there; he needs to stay invisible. But he’s found that he can deal with the bustle and city noise so long as he stays outside; the sound floats up and away, and he strolls on. He never takes the subway, but he doesn’t mind a walk. The island isn’t as long as people think. The sun warms his shoulders, but it has no bite. He can feel that the city has stepped out of summer’s long shadow at last.

He circles the cluster of market stalls twice before he steps inside, checking for new construction, traffic patterns. Anything out of the ordinary. Anything which might complicate his escape if he must move quickly. But everything is exactly how it should be. There’s the buzz of midday shoppers, tourists, au pairs pushing prams.

He buys a bundle of small round vegetables like tiny watermelon, which the shopkeeper insists are eggplant. While he browses for more, he listens to the patter of her words as she talks across the stall to another customer. The women are Thai and they speak the northern dialect. They chat about the weather, their kids. It is all familiar, all safe. Sasha picks up a pear, sets it down. He doesn't let on that he has any idea what they're talking about. Sasha never speaks anything other than English here. He can't make himself memorable. But he likes to browse the vegetables and the fruit and, at cooler times of year, the fish, and he soaks in the second-hand companionship. He likes to haggle a little bit.

There's a sensation rising in him. He has to browse and dismiss the vegetables on offer at three more stalls before he can put a name to it: anticipation.

Tonight they'll charge the arm. Which makes this day their anniversary, of sorts. He decides he’ll make curry; he has a limited repertoire of cooking skills, but he can manage a simple curry. Natasha can help if she wants, or not.

He’s in the kitchen when she returns, chopping peppers. There’s a song on his lips he doesn’t recognize, but the words come to him as he goes, tripping out his mouth one after another, and the beat matches the slice of the knife. He doesn’t ask where she’s been, just scoots over a little to make room at the counter while she washes her hands. She’ll tell him if she wants, if she thinks he needs to know.

Sasha puts a pan on the stove to heat and hands her the knife. He watches over her shoulder as Natasha cuts into the tiny watermelon. They do look like eggplant inside.

It is one last perfect moment. Sasha pecks a quick kiss on her bare shoulder, dancing out of range before she can swat at him, and then reality comes crashing back into their lives in the shape of Iron Man tumbling through the breakfast room window. Their park view collapses in a rain of tinkling glass.

Sasha has the frying pan. Natasha has the paring knife. It's not much.

Natasha hisses to him, "Front hall!" and then she dives right, running low through the butler's passage, sprinting to grab their go bags. They rehearse a drop and run at least once a month, but they’ve never rehearsed one quite like this.

Tony Stark, Iron Man. He stands and brushes the nuggets of broken glass off his red and gold shoulders. They fall to the ground like sparkling confetti.

Yes, Sasha thinks. They might need the rocket launcher.

Sasha dives, but he isn't quick enough. A repulsor blast catches him in the leg and sends him spinning across across the room. Natasha's been egging him to up his exercises. "You're slowing down, old man," she teased him, just yesterday. Maybe she's right. He drops the frying pan and sprints. His leg burns, but he can ignore the pain. It isn’t damaged.

"I just want to talk!" Stark calls, striding through the wreck of their kitchen, treading glass and peanut sauce and pulped eggplant all across their beautiful hardwood floors. He bends down and twists the stove burner off. The knob looks tiny in his hand. He sounds exactly like he does on TV.

"We're neighbors. Did you know? My place is right upstairs. So I have to say, just as one concerned homeowner to another: the power spikes are a little alarming. You should really think about getting an electrician in to take a look at the place.”

The rocket launcher is in the front hall closet, stacked neatly in an urn, half-heartedly hidden behind a handful of hotel umbrellas. Sasha grabs a Sig off the top shelf and slips it into his jeans then extricates the rocket launcher as quietly as he can.

“Historically, you know, I would just ignore little stuff like that. It's none of my business if you want to throw a TENS party for half of Manhattan. But I've gotten a little more cautious recently, what with the betrayal and the kidnapping and the torture. You may have seen something about that on the news.

"But I just want to talk, just the three of us and—oh, yeah, maybe whoever it is you're working for. Is it Ten Rings? Al-Qaeda?"

Natasha slides their go bags across the living room floor, towards Sasha where he crouches next to the door, hidden from Stark’s view. This next bit will be the tricky part, Sasha thinks. She has to cross the open expanse of living room between Iron Man and the door.

 

She stands up, right in front of Stark.

"Ok, wow. Definitely not al-Qaeda."

Even through the suit, Sasha can tell he's checking her out. He snorts, and keeps the Sig trained on the back of the suit's knee; Sasha knows a thing or two about armor plating, and that's where it must be weakest.

Sasha hasn't fired a weapon in four years, eight months, and thirteen days, but it still feels as familiar as breathing. His hands do not shake. He moves his hand to the trigger.

Natasha catches his eye. Wait. Let him talk.

“Mr. Stark," she says smoothly. "It's a pleasure to meet you. Here. In the flesh, so to speak. In the metal? In my living room. So gracious of you to stop in."

"Who do you work for?"

"No one," she says. There's acid in her voice.

He steps back.

"Really? Because I heard about a girl—excuse me, a woman—running a series of hits out on Long Island this summer. Real beautiful work, the guys say. A whole lot of training in those kills. And normally I wouldn't pay much attention to these sorts of things, like I said. The mob wants to kill the mob? Whatever. But here you are in my apartment building, doing kinky shit with electricity."

Sasha sighs. Natasha had been so sure those jobs would be untraceable.

"I don't work for anyone," she repeats.

"And your little pal over there?" Stark gestures towards Sasha. "That sure looks like a Soviet star he's sporting on that shoulder. It's very retro chic."

Sasha sees just the moment when Natasha's irritation boils over. He shoots. As he expected, the impact does no real damage. But it does knock Stark off to one side just long enough for Natasha to duck and roll, and slide inside his guard.

In the end, they don’t need the rocket launcher. It is almost pitifully easy to put Tony down. Tony Stark was nothing before he became Iron Man. He must have known how to shoot; you can't build a rifle if you don't know what a rifle needs to be. But he wasn't a soldier, or even a particularly accomplished marksman. He didn't have their training or their experience. The only real challenge is not hurting him until he figures out he's beat.

Sasha’s second shot to the knee finds purchase. Tony turns and the servos whine but the suit barely moves. When Tony looks away from her, Natasha swings in. There must be some cameras in the suit, Sasha thinks. Stark’s peripheral vision would be useless, otherwise. But he can't move the damaged leg fast enough. Natasha shoots out the repulsor on the damaged foot and the thing becomes a dead weight.

They push him back and forth until he figures out he’s beat. He’s a smart guy; it doesn’t take long. When he stops fighting, they step back. Stark presses a hand to the side of his head and the faceplate slides open. Sasha notes the location, files it away. His professional brain is an unwelcome return.

"Okay,” Stark coughs. "So, I figure if you wanted to kill me you probably could have done it at least three times in the last two minutes."

“Four,” Natasha mutters.

Sasha thinks she's being charitable.

"But you didn't. So maybe I read this wrong."

"Why do you own an apartment here?" Sasha blurts out. "You own a whole tower across the park. It's twenty blocks away."

Stark waves this away, as though it is a trivial matter. "There's a park in the way. Green stuff. I'm allergic to green stuff." He laughs at this, like it's a great personal joke.

He points to Sasha. “More importantly, _you_ are not Ilya Demetrovich," he says.

Sasha says nothing. His body, gloveless, sleeves pushed up over skin and gleaming metal, is enough of an answer. He doesn't think Russian playboys are really into body mods, although he doesn't exactly follow the fashions.

Stark gestures at the arm. “That is a beautiful piece of hardware. Who made it?"

Sasha shrugs.

Stark turns back to Natasha. "Your boy's not much of a talker," he says.

Natasha looks at him. Sasha can read the calculation in the gleam of her eye. He doesn't know what she's planning, but he trusts her. He nods.

She tells him the truth.

An abbreviated truth, of course, because they have approximately three minutes remaining before the full force of the NYPD descends upon the building.

"You expect me to believe all that?" Tony says.

Natasha shrugs. "It's the truth. It doesn't matter whether you believe it or not."

"So you're up against all that and you're out here doing hits for the mob in Long Island."

"Everyone has to eat," she says, looking at him. "You want to make me a better offer?"

Stark looks like he's actually considering it.

No, Sasha thinks. No. Absolutely not. He is not going to work for Tony Stark.

"You move against the suit when you fight," Natasha says. "It slows you down. Sasha can teach you how to move with it. He’s… retired, but he can do that."

She’s not wrong. Tony Stark might be one hell of an engineer, but he doesn't know shit about fighting and there's only so much the suit can compensate for its operator.

Natasha must be able to sense Sasha’s outrage. Her gaze pins him to the rug like an insect. She says, in Russian, "There's no way out of this room without an agreement. You want to stay invisible, you don't kill Tony Stark."

"He got himself blown up by his own bomb," Sasha hisses back. "And you want to work for him?"

"I've got red in my ledger," she says. “Whatever Stark wants can’t be any worse than offing people for the mob.”

This is the difference between them. This has always been the difference between them. She wants to make things right. He simply wants them to go away. Stark's money can make a whole lot of things right.

 

Tony looks every bit as surprised by Natasha’s offer as Sasha feels.

There’s another moment of silence while Sasha tries to figure out a suitable response that doesn’t involve simply grabbing Natasha and running. That plan has only a sixty percent chance of success; thirty if he takes the stairs.

And then, in the wreckage of the nicest place Sasha's ever called home, Stark's phone rings. He pats around his hips, as though he can get at the phone through the suit. Sasha is, unwillingly, impressed that Stark can fit in the suit while wearing anything with pockets. He imagined Tony was naked in there, or in some special lycra suit.

"Oh, for the love of— JARVIS, reroute,” Stark snaps, like he's reprimanding a dog, and the ringing abruptly cuts off.

"This is Tony," he answers, and he goes still. "Yeah, yeah, okay, go ahead.“ He snaps the faceplate shut. Sasha's hearing is good, but whatever tech Tony is using, Sasha can’t hear either side of the conversation. The stillness is eerie. Iron Man is still and quiet. The suit doesn't move at rest, like a human would. It just stands. Whatever small movements the man inside makes are absorbed by the shell. It's a damned creepy, Sasha thinks.

Tony sighs, and the sound is amplified to the room again. He's talking to them, not JARVIS or whoever it was on the phone. "So as much fun as this has been,” Tony says, “It turns out I've got places to be."

Natasha looks at Tony Stark with something like want. Sasha knows that expression. She licks her lips, tries to find just the right phrasing to unlock what she wants.

She asks, "What is it?” and Tony flips his hand towards an intact wall. Apparently the repulsor doubles as a projector. The wall becomes a desert, then blue sky marred by a column of thick black smoke, and then another building, the angle looping up and down again with the stride of someone running. There’s an explosion. A handful of men with guns cross an open space between the buildings, what looks like some town square. Two of the men carry a crate labeled STARK INDUSTRIES. The man closest stops walking, turns to face the person with the camera. The projection lies unevenly over the edge of a tilted picture frame still valiantly clinging to the wall, obscuring the man’s features. He aims, fires, and the cell phone camera rolls to the sky.

"When SI stopped selling weapons, we initiated a buyback program. Diesel generators for weapons. Hydroponics. All sorts of fun stuff you can't use to build a nuclear reactor. Surprisingly, it hasn't been a very popular program. We've had to get a bit more--forceful. Sometimes I need to do a personal pickup.”

"How old is this?” Natasha asks, still in that quiet voice. Sasha doubts Tony can hear the want in it.

“About two hours."

"How long to get there?"

"With the suit, four hours. With the jet, six.”

Tony looks torn. “You might not want me dead,” he says. “But neither do the guys stealing those crates, not really. But I know what they want: they want me to build more bombs. I don’t know what you want.”

Natasha is silent. She’s told him how this works, how sometimes a target will do what you want if you just give them enough time, but he’s never seen it happen.

“Yet I suspect that if I were to return here in twelve hours, I wouldn't find you both sitting around here twiddling your thumbs."

“No,” Natasha agrees.

Tony Stark has seen his face, his arm, his skills. This isn’t safe, or quiet, or invisible.

He thinks about the library. His notes, his books, all the projects half-finished. But damn him, if she's going he will follow. He will step back into hell for her.

_Not the first time, pal_ , says the man on the other side of the wall.

 

###

 

They fly through the dark on Tony Stark’s private jet and catch day again on the other side of the world. No passport needed.

Natasha watches Sasha's reflection in the glass. He stares straight ahead, jaw tight, hands flat and open across his palm like they're locked in place. The last time he was in a plane—it was a lifetime ago. The drop into Yuhzny.

She's nervous, but she can't let it show. If she did, Sasha would fall apart. She can feel him vibrating on the seat across from her. But she doesn't doubt her assessment. Tony Stark is a complication they can work with. This is an opportunity.

Tony keeps darting glances at Sasha's arm, like someone told him it is rude to stare but he can't help himself. Finally, three hours into their flight, he cracks. "So the power spikes. They're for the arm?"

Sasha nods.

"But that thing can't possibly run on AC. The response time. The speed. You'd need a battery half the size of Manhattan to power that thing on conventional electric. Not a sip every six months. It's impossible.”

Sasha shrugs, attempting to convey

“How long have you had it?" he asks.

"Awhile,” Sasha shrugs.

Natasha thinks about the files, the typed dates running back and back.

Tony raises his eyebrows. _It can speak_ , that look says. She can hear Sasha grind his teeth.

"And you feel fine?" Stark presses. He's looking for something, but Natasha doesn't know exactly what. That makes her nervous. She doesn’t like things she doesn’t understand. "No nausea, vomiting, or upset stomach?" He sounds like he's reciting from a commercial. No weird lines crawling up your torso?"

"No."

"Let me see."

No one but Natasha has touched him in four years, eight months, and twenty-six days. She recognizes that mule-stubborn look on his face. She doesn't know exactly what Tony sees. If you don't know him, most of Sasha's looks are just a different gradations of murderous intent.

Tony puts his hands up. "Not you. Just the arm."

"It doesn't come off."

"That's stupid," Tony says. "How would you upgrade--"

Natasha sees the moment when Tony's brain catches up to his mouth.

Sasha goes back to looking out the window. Natasha knows the shape of each one of the network of scars which cross his back. Long horizontal lines like tracks. Reinforcing the joint. Each surgery adding metal inch by inch to shore up the crumbling bone. She's seen the x-rays, the twisted metal snaking through his body, grafted to bone. The serum is the only reason he's alive.

Tony backs off. Natasha suspects the retreat is only temporary, but it holds until they touch down.

They're on an Air Force base. Even Natasha looks a little unsettled at that. But no one comes aboard. Air traffic control directs them to a quiet corner of runway and signs off. The whole base seem to be doing their best to pretend the jet doesn't exist. Whoever called in Stark is important enough to keep his arrival quiet.

He doesn’t offer to let her ride along, just says “Don’t wait up,” as he suits up again and goes.

It’s three hours before comes back. They wait on the tarmac, with the whole US Army playing unwitting babysitter, and Natasha wonders if maybe she’s bitten off more than she can chew.

Stateside again, Tony shuttles them from the jet to a car and then to an estate which makes the opulence of 43B look cheap. It’s still New York, she thinks, though she can’t be sure. They landed at a private airstrip, but all around them the trees are lit gold in their autumn finery in a way that screams New England.

Tony doesn't live in this sprawling estate. That much is clear at a glance, and when he ushers them inside, the house staff is conspicuously missing. A house like this can't run without staff. Those hedges don't clip themselves.

He's taken them out of the city. Thrown them like a grenade out of a foxhole.

That suits her just fine, Natasha tells herself. What do they need besides each other?

Still, there is reason to be cautious. They've proven that they can take him in a fair fight, but Tony Stark isn't an idiot. He won't fight them fair again. Exposure is his biggest weapon. One word to the wrong people and the governments of at least twelve countries will come knocking for her. She can't guess how many more have it out for the Winter Soldier.

But Tony doesn't seem to quite know what to do with them, now that he has them. He shows them to a suite of rooms the size of their apartment, then backs out, mumbling something about take out. None of them have slept in at least thirty hours.

_Well?_ Sasha's eyebrow lifts, as soon as they’re alone. _What now?_

Natasha doesn’t know what the surveillance is like here, but they need to talk using more than eyebrows, and she isn't willing to burn their hand signs just yet, not on something so innocuous.

“We sleep,” she says, “And we deal with the rest tomorrow. I didn't think he'd say yes," she admits. "I was stalling."

"But you'll do it?" he asks.

She shrugs. "Yeah."

Tony Stark fascinates her.

He puts Sasha's back up faster than anyone she's ever met. He treats people like things. Natasha isn't sure anything really gets through to him. Yet somewhere among all that detritus is a man who cares enough to drape himself in steel, strap himself to a jet engine, and go out and do his best to save the world.

She can work with that.

In the morning, Tony lures them downstairs with the smell of bacon and coffee.

"What do you want?" Tony asks. He’s seated at the breakfast table with a muffin, a cup of coffee, wearing a black t-shirt and jeans. There’s a smear of engine grease across his nose. She’s not certain he slept at all. He looks like he’s burning up from the inside.

"Well, we had a place to live," Sasha grouses. "I had a job, a house, everything a fella could want."

But Natasha cuts him off with a quick wave of her hand. Tony needs them to _want_ something from him, something he can give. Sasha doesn’t want anything more than he already has. He wants peace and quiet, but Natasha wants a life that doesn’t bore her out of her mind. Tony needs to establish a familiar relationship with them, and what could be more familiar to him than someone wanting his money?

"A dentist," Natasha says. "I want to see a dentist."

They have a little bit of cash. They steal what they can, but the risk-to-reward ratio is too high. Neither of them worries much about getting booked by a beat cop, but they know the danger of being photographed; all it takes is one ping on the wrong server, and their quiet life will evaporate. And even the free clinic stores dental records.

"A dentist?" Tony asks, incredulous.

Clearly, he's never gone four years without dental.

But he complies and an earnest but bewildered-looking young man arrives at the estate the next day, clutching a bag of dentistry tools and wheeling a portable digital x-ray. He says nothing when Natasha flicks the hard drive out of the laptop he rigged to the x-ray machine and smashes it under her heel. Sasha waits in the doorway, just out of the dentist’s his line of sight, while the man prods at the tooth that’s been bothering her.

“This will need a crown soon,” he says. “But I can fill it for now.”

After he goes, Natasha shows Tony a series of stances and blocks which will use the suit’s power to his advantage.

Tit for tat. Ask and give. Nothing for free. Nothing on trust.

It’s a start.

They spend the winter on the estate. September slides into October, then November, and December.

Sasha sleeps with a set of stolen keys to one of Tony’s cars stashed underneath his pillow. All the cars have trackers, of course, but they'd make it to the highway at least.

Natasha spars with Tony. She pushes him as far as he’ll let her. She doesn't fight him in the suit. Not all the time. She says he needs to learn to be careful, and he can’t do that with a thousand pounds of steel. He knows better than she does that the suit is not invulnerable, and he needs to learn to fight without it. He’s stiff on the left side, she tells him. He always defaults right.

Sasha watches them, sometimes. He thinks she maybe just enjoys punching Tony in the mouth.

It’s a quiet season, but now and again, Tony’s phone rings or JARVIS chimes for his attention, and he disappears for a few days. Sometimes it’s Stark Industries business; sometimes he takes the suit. If Tony gets himself killed out there, they’ll be on their own again. Sasha discovers he likes the comfort of life on Tony’s estate. The little familiarities, the rhythms of life so close to the earth. The peace of the sleeping ground seeps into Sasha’s thoughts.

Tony comes back from the second op with a gash running chin to forehead where the faceplate cracked and slammed back into him.

“You dodged left,” Natasha says, surveying the wreck of Tony’s face.

If he’d gone right, Sasha guesses, he’d be dead.

After the stitches come out, Tony brings Natasha a headset and asks her to ride along on ops.

The brilliance of her smile makes him begin to trust Tony then, just a little.

Stark's mansion has two kitchens.

There’s one in the back of the house, with a wide expanse of commercial appliances, racks of gleaming stainless steel, and stoves with more burners than he has fingers—both flesh and metal. That makes sense, Sasha figures, because Stark's dining table seats forty.

The second kitchen is is smaller, around the front of the house, with a charming view out into a manicured herb garden. It pretends that it is a household kitchen, fit for all the household's needs, with granite counters and a breakfast nook that seats four. It isn't cozy, not exactly; there's nothing in Stark's mansion which feels small enough to be cozy. But it feels personal, approachable, in a way that the larger kitchen is not.

Sasha doesn’t use the big kitchen. He stepped inside one time and discovered that he carries a strong dislike for any room with a floor drain. He pokes at that feeling like Natasha’s did her bad tooth, but there's no memory behind it. Not close to the surface, at least. He doesn’t look deeper.

Tony Stark is a lot like his two kitchens, Sasha thinks.

Most people would probably say that the truest representation of Tony is his workshop. And maybe that's true. The workshop is who he wants to be, what he has built for himself. But the kitchens are the sign of his people, where he comes from. The kitchen of society dinners and seven course meals. The other kitchen, where someone once cooked.

But the little kitchen isn’t a lie, not entirely, not even now, when whoever cooked here once is long gone. There's coffee burbling into the pot, and in a moment Stark or Natasha will come to collect their first cup of the day.

This morning there's a mug set out on the kitchen counter, tilted at just the perfect angle so Sasha can see the hammer and sickle printed in red to match the star on his arm.

Of course.

"Thanks, Tony," Sasha says. JARVIS will tell him.

Is that how Tony keeps going, Sasha wonders. Does he just poke at what he doesn't understand? Poke at the tender spots until they stop hurting? It serves him well in engineering. It's what makes him a good engineer, but damn if it doesn't make him hard to live with.

Sasha rubs a hand over his face. It rained last night. He never sleeps well when it rains, and it makes him irritable. He takes the mug and fills it, even though he knows the coffee won’t help.

Stark shuffles downstairs a few minutes later, although it’s still dark outside.

Sasha knows then what it is that he wants. He knows what happened to Tony in the desert. Half the world knows what happened to Tony. But when they look at him, that's not what they see. He's buried that experience so far down most people might think they’ve healed, that he's still the slick, sarcastic playboy. But when it rains, Sasha can see him. He slinks about like that sound of water makes his bones ache. What exactly did they do to him? Sasha doesn't know and he doesn't want to ask. He doesn't want that question turned around towards him. He wants to bury it, and he thinks Tony might be able to show him how.

"How do you pretend it never happened?" Sasha asks. It is easier to ask questions like that in the dark.

Tony does him the courtesy of not pretending he has no idea what Sasha is asking about, not making him spell it out. Tony just shrugs. ”You want to let me take a look at that arm?" he asks.

It’s not an answer, but it is.

"Sure," Sasha says, surprising even himself. “Why not?”

Sasha follows him around to the workshop. He’s never been inside. It's not a lab, Sasha tells himself. There's no prick of rifles at his back. His hands are free. They're not even going underground. But by the time they make it to the lab his nerves are fried. The rumbling of the chair Tony rolls to him snaps his nerves. He catches the chair with his left hand and the back snaps clear off.

Tony watches him warily. Good. He should be afraid, Sasha wants to tell him. Sasha is a monster. But he keeps quiet. He doesn't want to scare Tony off, not if Tony can teach him how to bury the monster.

When Tony rolls a stool to him, Sasha sits. He strips off his shirt and tries not to grind his teeth as Tony whistles. Tony taps the star on the arm. “Retro,” he says. and shows Tony where to press to open the panel. The places are too far apart for him to manage himself. The arm was never designed for him to service. It isn't his arm at all. They didn't want it to be his arm. He was a tool for them as much as the arm was.

Tony flicks the panel open and fishes about inside. Sasha cranes his neck to see as best he can. The arm isn't solid, exactly. There's structure under the skin, but it's honeycomb, not solid.

“Like bird bones," Tony mutters. "That's how they keep the weight down. I manage it with the gooey human center, but obviously your people were going for a different look."

"They're not my people," Sasha says, reflexively.

Tony keeps fiddling with the screwdriver. "Of course they're your people," he says, punctuating that sentence with an extra jab that sends a tremor like an electric shock coursing through Sasha's shoulder. "Otherwise you'd be theirs and obviously that's not true.

“This is some pretty neat stuff and I don't often say that about tech that isn't mine. Frankly, I don't know what this is. This doesn't look like anything I've ever seen. Doesn't even look human, honestly, except for this.” Tony uses a pair of forceps to pry out a small box, the size of two batteries taped together. A cluster of slender, thread-thin wires drapes from either end, running back down into the structure of the arm and up towards his shoulder.

"Found where all that power's going," Tony says. "It's an interface, sort of. Whatever this is is translating your brain waves into motion this arm can understand. It's neural net. This is sort of like a bug sitting on top of all that. Monitoring, jolting something back into the feed every now and then. It's not a tracker. More like--an inhibitor? It's supposed to limit, not enhance."

"So why does it slow things down when it runs out of juice?"

"If all the circuitry is routed this doodad and it goes screwy, I could see that causing the behavior you describe."

"What is it inhibiting?" Sasha asks. But he knows. As soon as the words are out of his mouth, he knows.

"No idea,” Tony says. “I’m pretty sure I can take it out without killing you, although there's a chance you might lose the mobility in the arm."

Tony pulls up a visualization. "It doesn't store all that electricity. It can't. It stores just a little. You've got to change the batteries every year, like a smoke detector. The electrical spike is there to overwhelm the connection between your arm and the neural web. That interruption allows the box to insert itself back between the two, keep itself between you and the arm. But the arm starts to route around. See, here and here, these electrical pathways? I'll bet those didn't exist a month ago."

"I don't know what it does, but you've been playing their game for this time. Whatever they wanted, you've been maintaining it."

Tony invites Pepper Potts to dinner.

Natasha can’t help but think of it as a sort of graduation. That they’ve been trusted to be in the same room as her. They’re off quarantine.

Pepper appears to think differently. She eyes Natasha suspiciously. She’s used to young women hanging around Tony’s money.

"They're consultants," Tony explains. He looks wary, like Natasha might attempt something horrible if he doesn’t watch her every second. But Natasha knows how to be polite and charming, and she understands just how important Pepper really is to Tony, although Natasha isn't quite sure if Tony himself has fully realized that, yet.

Natasha keeps herself just inside Sasha's space. He's spooked already. Strangers always make him uncomfortable. But Natasha barrels ahead. She curves her whole body towards Sasha. Her body language trumpets, _This is my serious and committed relationship and I am in no way interested in making a move on Tony Stark, although of course I understand your in him is purely professional_. That's a lot to say with the angle of her shoulders and the tilt of her head, but Natasha is an expert.

Sasha is quiet. Pepper tries to draw him out. Their conversation wends a careful path from books to scenic locations in the French countryside--Pepper quite wisely does not ask when or why Sasha was visiting these locations.

Halfway through dinner, Pepper says, "Excuse me a moment. I left something in the kitchen. Tony, can you come with me? I can never remember where you keep the salt."

Natasha sets her napkin on the table. She stands and follows them silently toward the kitchen. There's a bend in the hall between the dining room and the small kitchen, to hide the view from any guests. Natasha keeps herself in reach of cover.

"Just give them a chance, Pep," she hears Tony say. " Think of it like a rescue. Helping the community."

"They aren't puppies, Tony. You can't just pick people up off the street. Or the KBG or wherever you found them."

"Manhattan."

"What?"

"I found them in Manhattan. We were neighbors, did you know? That building by the park. That place your mother stayed at that time she came up to the city.”

"Oh.” Pepper sounds surprised. “That's a very nice building."

"See? My strays have excellent taste. Very trustworthy."

"So why are they in your guest room if they have a place in Manhattan?"

"Well, uh, there may have been a small misunderstanding when we first met. Very small. And some light repulsor fire, which led to actual real fires.”

Pepper sighs. "I don't want the details. It didn't make the news, therefore it does not affect SI stock price, therefore I don't need to know. Tony, how long have these people been staying at the mansion? You've been out here for months. Usually it's like pulling teeth to get to you stay a weekend in New York."

"I'm learning. I'm learning a lot, and listen, Pep, I'm training JARVIS. This is some crazy assassin stuff."

"Tony. I told you, I don't want to know--"

"I know, I know. But they're keeping me safe. This is, like, insane ninja-level stuff. She's good. And she's _good_. I can feel it."

“What about the other one? The broody one? He's been staring at that steak like he wants to be sure it’s dead. Is he _good_ too, Tony?”

"He's... complicated," Tony says.

Natasha sees his elbow in the bend of the hallway. He's lifted his hand to his neck, like he always does when he asks about Sasha's arm. Very specific questions. Toxicity. Rejection. She's certain he has no idea he does it. She's less certain what the lines mean, the ones he's rubbing at when he does this, the ones which dot his torso like geometric bruises. She doesn't know what they mean, but she can't imagine they mean anything good.

She wants to trust Tony. She really does. But her first responsibility is to keep Sasha safe, and that means Pepper must like her.

Pepper must not fear her, or Sasha, or everything they have worked to build with Tony will fall apart.

Tony is good for Sasha. He gives him someone to look to; someone in a not completely different situation.

Natasha slips back to the table. She’s already seated when Pepper and Tony return.

Fortunately, Pepper seems inclined to like anyone who is committed to insuring Tony's continued survival. Whatever misgivings she may have, she buries them in a second glass of wine. “To Tony’s continued survival,” Pepper says, raising her glass. “Despite his best attempts otherwise.”

* * *

 

They let him go to the Stark Expo alone. Clearly that was a mistake.

Natasha watches the hearing on C-SPAN when Tony gets hauled before the Senate, with Sasha beside her on the couch, his feet tucked under her leg. He puts down his book when the hearing starts, and takes out a notepad instead.

It isn't all that different than it was watching Tony on TV before they knew him. Tony isn't really Tony on TV; he plays everything up for the camera, stretches into a caricature of himself.

Sasha takes notes in shorthand, like he needs a record for himself, like he can't just ask JARVIS to play back the hearing whenever he wants. Natasha is pretty certain that shorthand wasn't one of the skills they taught him. Their handlers hadn't been to keen on mission reports from the Winter Soldier. _Is the target dead?_ Beyond that, they didn't much care for details.

When Tony uses his phone to hijack the screens in the on the floor of Congress, however, and uses them to stream footage of various nations' attempts to recreate the Iron Man suit, Sasha stops taking notes.

"Stark is being difficult,” he says. "Starks tend to die when they become difficult.”

And they are absolutely not discussing the circumstances surrounding that anywhere near Tony Stark's semi-sentient house. Natasha squints at the screen, where another Iron Man prototype trips over its own feet. "I think I recognize that hanger,” she says.

But Sasha won’t be deterred. “If you want to keep him alive, you'll have to fight for it." He says it offhand, like he doesn’t care; but if he didn’t care, he wouldn’t say it at all.

"Like last week?" They were in Afghanistan again. She's tired of covering Tony's ass in Afghanistan. There’s an extra satellite jump and the additional milliseconds of delay makes her nauseous every time she uses the headset. It makes her snappish.

But she knows what Sasha means. They have the chance for a nice quiet life here in Tony's shadow. Stark is their golden goose. Left to his own devices, he'll wander about until he gets himself squeezed.

"What do you want to do?" Natasha asks.

Sasha sighs. “I have a book to finish. It's on deadline. I've got the publisher crawling up my ass. If I don't get them this translation soon they're going to put me back on toaster manuals."

She’s pretty sure the leases have expired on his various Post Office boxes by now, and she knows for a fact that he left the ring of keys back in Manhattan. They don’t need the money right now, anyway. "You're trying to change the subject."

"I want you to be happy,” he says. “And I want this thing out of my arm, whatever it is.”

“We’re going to have to keep a closer eye on Tony,” Natasha says.

 

When Tony proposes a vacation, at first she is relieved. He made enemies on this trip. (“ _New_ enemies,” Sasha interjects.) It would be a good idea to lie low for awhile, let all those animosities burn themselves out without adding new fuel.

When he suggests the Monaco Grand Prix, she is less enthusiastic.

“Oh, come on. What’s the worst that could happen?” he asks.

But Pepper is coming, and Tony is usually on his best behavior around Pepper, so Natasha doesn’t argue too hard against it, merely slides Tony a list of her “requirements” for the trip which includes items like C4, hand grenades, and a new set of concealed pistols. He skims it. “You want a sniper rifle?”

“Sasha is coming too,” she says.

Sasha hasn’t left the compound since they arrived.

“He’s not on the list,” Tony says.

Sasha plucks the list from Tony’s hand, scrawls his name, and drops it on the table between them.

“Keep him on a short leash,” Tony tells her, but there’s no rancor in his voice.

Sasha’s only response is, “Woof.”

“There you have it,” Natasha says. “Straight from the horse’s mouth.”

Tony looks at her oddly. “They didn’t spend much time on animal identification at your secret Soviet murder school, did they?”

 

###

 

Sasha can’t sleep the night before they leave. There’s nothing he needs to pack. His bag sits next to the door like it does every day. The rifle has its own case. He feels off balance, untethered, like if he’s not careful he’ll float away from this life too.

When he finally gives up on sleep, his feet take him down to Tony’s workshop.

It’s occupied. “Can’t sleep?” Sasha asks.

Tony shrugs. “Bad dreams.”

He pulls up a diagram in the air between them, and spins it with a flick of his wrist. Sasha recognizes the box in his arm, the wires trailing out from either end.

“I figured out what this thing does,” Tony says.

“Does that mean you can take it out?” Sasha asks.

Tony spins the diagram again. “Don’t you want to know what it does?”

Sasha looks away. “I don’t care what it does. I want it gone.”

“I think you don’t care, because you already know.”

_Hold_. _Down. Ready to comply._

“I don’t know,” Sasha admits. “But I can guess.”

“And you’re sure you want me to take it out? You’re sure the world doesn’t need a little extra insurance that you’re not about to embark on another murderous rampage?”

“Yes.”

”That's it? No sleeping on it, no consideration with the better half?”

“If it’s theirs, I don’t want it.”

Tony absently rubs at his chest. “Yeah, I get it. Sometimes the thing that’s keeping you alive is also what’s killing you.”

Sasha says nothing.

“It’ll take some time,” he says, as he closes the panel. “I’ll need to run some scans, get a better idea of what this all is before I can rip it out.”

Sasha makes a fist, listening to the familiar whirr of the plates shifting and settling. “Do it,” he says. “Neither of us are getting any sleep tonight anyway.”

They arrive at the Hotel de Paris at the last possible second. Natasha follows Stark and Potts inside. Sasha heads to the roof.

There are police in discrete positions around the roof already, but it's no trouble to slip past them. Sasha tucks in behind one of the domes and begins assembling the rifle. It is a beautiful rifle; Stark spared no expense.

He’s nervous.

Natasha keeps up a steady chatter in his earpiece. “The floor’s clear,” she says. “Hammer is here, but he’s occupied. Not a threat. Right now, I’d say Potts is the only hostile in the room. She’s looking at me like I’m something she scraped off her shoe, except I’d bet she’s never scraped anything off her shoe in her life. She probably just buys a new pair.”

It’s meaningless, but it helps.

"He just stepped into the bathroom.” She sounds a touch frantic. “I’ve lost eyes on him. Damnit. Hammer—”

There’s a brush of static on the line.

When he hears her voice again, it’s not him she’s speaking too. "Where are you going, Tony?"

“That car out there is mine and yet I have never driven it. Did you know that? Not even once.”

"It's Formula One," Natasha says. “You have to qualify—”

"Do you know the reflexes it takes to handle the suit above Mach 1? This is nothing."

_Do not squeeze the goose. Do not squeeze the goose._

"Tony, please,” Natasha says. “Listen to me.”

"No can do, sweetheart. Keep an eye on Pep for me.”

"Great” Natasha growls into the earpiece. "I'm on babysitting duty."

He doesn’t know what she’s expecting, but he doubts it is Ivan Vanko.

When Natasha tumbles into the roadway, the suit in a suitcase held to her chest, his heart drops. No. Not this, not again. She doesn’t know where he is, she can’t watch his lines.

“Move, Natasha,” he calls over the radio. “Get out. I can’t get a clear shot.”

But the lines of electricity coursing through Vanko’s suit twist the signal into nothing but static.

She swings the suitcase towards Tony. He catches it. He hurries into the suit, but he’s not fast enough.

The news cameras roll, and they’re tracking her, not Stark.

Vanko turns towards her. The electric whips flash in his hands. She dodges, twisting away, and uses the shattered cars around them for vantage and coverage.

It’s been years since he watched her work. He’d forgotten just how beautiful she is like this. He just wishes he wasn’t seeing her through a scope.

“Get out,” he calls again.

His hands on the rifle feel the same. He wants them to feel different, wants everything to be different. He doesn’t know why everyone dresses like idiots these days. When did black go out of fashion? But at least the glowing blue ring makes for an easy target.

Maybe she hears him, maybe she doesn’t, but she steps back just enough for him to take the shot.

Boom. He hears the shot in double; once through the earpiece, once through the open air. The electric arms thrash around Vanko’s crumpled form, then still and curl, like the legs of a dead spider.

 


	4. Dreamer

_Like prisoners released in sleep,_

_To roam the forests green, so us,_

_Carried in dream to that land where_

_All life, before us, seemed so fair._

##### 2009

Tony leaves them with simple instructions: lie low for a few weeks, let the heat die down in Washington. Too many people saw what happened in Monaco.

“And these.” He drops a pair of Starkphones onto the seat between them. “In case I need you.”

Natasha doesn’t like it when he tries to give them orders, but she goes along with it, and brushes her hand against Sasha's arm to mute his protest, because she sees the genuine concern in Tony's eyes. He’s been subpoena’d again, and this time the hearings are all closed-door. The military brass didn't like it when Tony made himself the Iron Man suit, but mostly he used the suit to fly around making America's enemies look bad. Monaco was different. Monaco looked a lot more like Tony Stark building was building himself a private army.

So Natasha lets Tony hustle them back onto the jet, up up and away like magic. They fly north and west, into the night and through it. The lights of Europe fall away, swallowed by the Atlantic.

Sasha is tense against her side. A shadow, like the night below. He looks almost ludicrously out of place in the brushed mahogany interior of Tony Stark's private jet. When they touch down at last, and step out into the windy Arctic spring, he relaxes a fraction.

They named him well, Natasha remembers: the Winter Soldier.

But he's not their Soldier anymore. He's her Sasha, and he is his own man.

“Where are we going, Tony?” Natasha asks.

“ _I_ am going to Washington to have a little chat with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. _You_ are going ice fishing. A perfectly harmless, perfectly safe pastime. Far outside the public eye.”

“You’re shoving us out of a plane on top of the world and leaving us there until everyone forgets about us,” Sasha says.

Tony beams at him. “I’m so glad you understand,” he says.

It’s a bad plan, but she can’t see a better one. She doesn’t trust Tony to effectively argue their interests, but she also doesn’t want to place herself in their power in order to argue for herself. Tony’s offering them space. Not freedom, but at least a moment to breathe. “Okay,” Natasha says.

The jet sets down, briefly, at a private strip in Halifax, and Tony passes them off to a prop plane which takes them further north over lakes and trees until there are no more trees. The plane lands in a little airfield that barely merits the name, really just a mown patch of tundra, and there’s a helicopter waiting for them.

This handoff is the weak point in the chain. Tony recognized the pilot who took them from Halifax to wherever this is, and Tony assembled the crew of the _Maria Stark_ , their final destination. But Tony isn’t here to vouch for this flight crew.

They can overpower the pilot if they need to, Natasha decides. It’s been years since she’s flown a helicopter, but surely it’s just like riding a bike.

The pilot looks tense, as though he can follow her reasoning, but that could be just the way Sasha’s glaring at him. The pilot is clearly a professional, though, and the routine of the pre-flight check seems to steady him. The helicopter goes up, and turns out to sea. From this height the land looks featureless, a blank dark carpet of snow and sea; the only defining feature is the line where they meet.

Their destination comes over the horizon after just a few minutes in the air. The ship is small. The manifest JARVIS sent her contains the names and profiles of only twenty crew—a statistically-improbable number of whom are conventionally-attractive women under forty; Tony is nothing if not predictable—but any ship looks small in the open ocean.

They touch down without incident and are met at the helipad by blonde woman in a thick parka, the hood whipped back in the breeze the slowing chopper kicks up. Natasha recognizes her from the manifest. Sally Reyes Rivera, captain.

“Welcome aboard the _Maria Stark_.”

* * *

A week passes with no word from Tony. Then two. Natasha thinks they should have established a code before he left. She’s getting sloppy.

The get news in snippets, by satellite, or when they anchor in range of a settlement. The networks aren’t showing anything new about Tony, just the same loop from Monaco again and again: him, in the suit; her, at his side. Ivan Vanko’s body.

At the end of the second week, the helicopter brings a crate of supplies to replace the stores their unexpected arrival has depleted. Summer or no, this is a harsh land. It would be unwise to run down their supply. Natasha squirrels away a pile of chocolate bars; she makes friends as best she can, but it’s hard going with her face plastered all over the news.

Half the crew is dedicated to keeping the _Maria_ afloat. The other half is an even split of whale researchers and archeologists. The whale researchers seem to be having a better time of it. The ship keeps close to the ice, where the shelf calves into the ocean and the whales like to feed. They have been at sea for nearly a month already, since the earliest days of spring in the Arctic, by the time Natasha and Sasha come aboard, and most of them are returning from prior years on the ice. The crew is a unit. The two of them are outsiders.

Natasha stays close to the captain, who is especially fond of dark chocolate with almonds. She learns everything she can. Captain Reyes is ex-military and she doesn’t scare as easily as some of the other crew.

“What is he doing?” the captain asks. They’ve been watching Sasha out on deck for nearly an hour.

Natasha shrugs. “Watching for ice.”

“Does he realize we have instruments for that?”

Sasha tries to help in the galley, but his knife skills alarmed the cook. He can eviscerate a chicken or dice a carrot in a shockingly short span of time. His movements are quick and efficient, like a surgeon’s, yet somehow the potential for violence still shines through.

When their stares get to be too much, he goes up on deck. He looks for icebergs. He’s got good eyes, even against the ice and snow, and he doesn’t really feel cold the way most men do.

How can she explain? Natasha doesn’t try, just doles out another square of chocolate to keep Reyes talking. The woman spools out the whole story over the course of one slow afternoon, while the _Marie_ sails open water over calm seas under clear skies stretching to the horizon. It’s breathtakingly beautiful, but there’s very little need of the captain.

The Starks have been searching the Arctic Ocean for decades, Reyes explains. “They call it a research expedition, but that’s mostly for tax purposes, although the whale people have done some good work. Howard pulled something up from the seafloor back in the sixties. Everyone’s very hush-hush about the details and it was long before my time. But whatever it was got them excited. They commissioned this girl, my _Maria Stark,_ in ’68.” Reyes taps the rail in front of her.

From how little Tony speaks of his upbringing, and how much the tabloids wrote of it, Natasha gathers that the Stark household was not a happy place. Natasha feels a flash of sympathy for Tony's mother. The _Maria Stark_ must have been a magnificent vessel when she first launched, but surely no woman wants her husband comparing her to a boat.

"But there was nothing. Dead end after dead end. When I came on board two years ago, the crew was a mess. I think Howard finally gave up in the eighties. He brought Tony up with him a few times, for a week here or there, but mostly he treated this place like a floating bachelor pad. When he came aboard, he wasn’t looking for anything except a drink. Howard Stark was not a happy man.

Howard wasn't good with people, I think. He wanted every problem to be an engineering problem. But the ice isn't like that. It moves; it shifts. You plot it on a grid, you might search the same plot three times in a season. You have to talk with people. You have to learn the stories.

“White people come up here and they want to think they’re alone at the top of the world. Butpeople have lived here for thousands of years. I’ve got two groups of ethnologists on payroll now, working in the villages, and a doctor up here to help get them in. These are close-knit communities, but a doctor is welcome anywhere. A doctor isn’t such an easy thing to get, this far north.”

Natasha runs her tongue over her filling; she understands.

"I wasn’t sure it would work," the captain admits with a shrug. “I thought it was a long shot, still, but they turned up these last year.” She dips her hand into her pocket and pulls up a thin piece of metal about the size of her palm, one edge twisted where it must have broken loose from something larger. She drops it into Natasha’s hand. The metal is light, a smooth. It feels an awful lot like one of the plates from Sasha’s arm. She doesn’t know what it is supposed to be.

“The _Valkyrie_ —I think we can find her. It’s a big area, but it’s not empty. Someone in these villages remembers. Someone saw something. The flight, the wreckage, something. She’s out there.”

There’s a firm note of conviction in her voice.

Natasha tries to hand it back, but the captain waves her off. “Keep it,” Reyes says. “You can call it a thank you gift. Last year, it was all the same as before. Grids, grids, grids. I fielded that first team out of my own pocket. Stark barely noticed we were here. He treated this expedition like a part of his father's legacy. Something he had to do. But this spring, he calls me up and he says, 'What are your ideas? What do you want?' I was so surprised I told him. The second team of ethnographers came in just last week.

“I don't know exactly what happened between last spring and now, but it seems like Tony Stark has finally figured out that he isn't the only competent person on Earth, and I'm willing to bet you had something to do with that." She eyes Natasha up and down. "Because you sure as hell don't work in legal, or whatever it was they said on the news. I saw what happened in Monaco. They don't teach you to fight like that in law school."

Natasha prepares her protestations, but the captain waves them away.

“I just thought you should know. We're picking up the second team the day after tomorrow. They’ve got something. I don't know what it is, but they sound pretty excited. I told them to keep it off comms. Beginner’s luck, I guess. Isn’t that how it always goes?”

* * *

Reyes isn’t her only source of information. It isn’t easy to eavesdrop on a ship—every surface is metal, painted and repainted and echoing—but Natasha has plenty of practice. It’s not so different than an underground bunker, and she spent the first sixteen years of her life in one of those.

There are two researchers in particular who stare at Sasha during dinner like he’s a joke in poor taste. Gunderson and Williams, both on the archeology team. Natasha tails them out of the dining hall that evening, walking just far enough back that she sees them only in flashes, when the corridor turns. But she can hear them.

“What’s up with the Bucky Barnes lookalike?” Williams asks.

Gunderson is slender. He looks boney even through the parka. When he shrugs, the movement brings his sparrow-thin shoulders halfway to his eyebrows. “Chisel says he’s Stark’s bodyguard.”

“Why does Iron Man need a bodyguard?”

“He was kidnapped and tortured and held hostage for, like, six months. I can’t say I blame him if he wants a little extra protection.”

“But you saw the guy, right? He’s Bucky Barnes plus five years and a bad haircut. It’s eerie.”

Williams doesn’t deny it. “It could be plastic surgery,” she says.

“That might actually be the creepiest thing Tony Stark has ever done.”

“I’m staying out of it. If you want your grant renewed for next season, you should probably do the same. He looks like he could snap you in half.”

“I do Crossfit, you know. It’s not all about muscle. You need flexibility, too, and those bodybuilder types just don’t have it.”

The rest of their conversation is meaningless. She loses them between one curve of the hallway and the next, and doesn’t

Bucky Barnes. Who the hell is Bucky Barnes?

She has a dim memory of something… was it a film? They watched a lot of films in the Red Room. It was an easy way to familiarize the girls with Western societal expectations.

She could ask JARVIS, but she doesn’t trust the AI with anything pertaining to Tony, and the connection here is hit and miss. JARVIS requires a lot of bandwidth. She goes to the ship’s library instead, which is surprisingly well-stocked on all matters pertaining to navigation, icebergs, and Captain America.

It’s that last section where she finds what she’s looking for.

James Buchanan Barnes. Bucky. Born 1917. MIA, presumed dead, 1944.

There’s a photo.

There are a lot of photos, actually, but there’s one she flips back to again and again. Barnes is smiling in the others; they’re portraits or candid shots taken in crowds. In this one, though, he stares straight at the camera. Azzano, the caption says. 1943.

It shouldn’t be possible. But even as a smudge of printed ink, she knows those eyes.

* * *

The easy thing would be to disappear. To take their chances on the sea ice. To run, again.

They have each given one lifetime to Hydra. They will give no more.

But the _Valkyrie_ cannot be allowed to complete her mission.

Natasha knows Tony well enough. He doesn’t look below the surface unless someone shoves his face into the water. He will be magnanimous in victory. He will hand over whatever he finds to the Smithsonian and never think about it again. He hasn’t been funding this expedition for twenty years in order to recover whatever weapons remained on board the _Valkyrie_. Tony is fulfilling a promise, and dragging science along with him.

But Natasha suspects that it won’t be the US government who will come to collect whatever he finds. And she knows that Tony will keep looking until he succeeds.

If they run now, they will be hand Hydra back the keys to their weapon. It is a different world than it was in 1945. Whatever is down there can’t be the awe-inspiring, world-ending arsenal it once was. But she still doesn’t like to think about what they might do with it.

And so, Natasha realizes, staring out over the ice and snow. Here she is, seventy years later, making the same choice Steve Rogers once had. His was easier: he’d chosen death, not life, and he hadn't had Bucky to consider.

Life was the harder choice. But they'd made it once before, when they stepped out of that shell of a life in Jersey, and they'd had a good five years. That was more than some people got.

Third shift is just starting when Natasha returns to their quarters. Sasha looks up from his own book, and his smile is so sweet. She wants to live in this world for just a while longer.

Tomorrow, she decides. She’ll tell him in the morning. Tonight will be theirs.

 

In the morning, over coffee, she slides the book towards him across the table.

Five years. A lifetime. She holds it in for one more breath, then lets it go.

She flips the book open to a different photo, one from before Azzano.

He takes it, but doesn’t say anything. Surely he can see his own face, but if that were enough to trigger his memory, all she would need was a mirror. It is disappointing, still, but memory isn't her gift to him.

"Look at the bottom," she says.

_James Buchanan “Bucky” Barnes. Drafted 1941._

This is the one gift she can give him, the one thing she can salvage out of this whole mess. ”You never volunteered.”

Sasha sips his coffee. Stark sent up that damn hammer and sickle mug in the first shipment of supplies after they arrived. Or maybe it is a different but identical mug. Natasha isn’t sure. She doesn't know if it's weirder to imagine Stark dispatching someone to the estate to grab a mug and ship it to the Arctic, or that he bought them in bulk and there’s a crate in some warehouse somewhere, filled with tacky mugs waiting to be dispatched to all corners of the globe at a moment’s notice.

"What kind of name is Bucky?" he says.

She laughs. She has to. She leans over the table and kisses him, whispers, “I love you.”

Maybe they can't be what they were before, but that doesn't mean they can't be okay.

* * *

A dozen people come out to greet them when the boat from the _Marie_ pulls ashore and they are instantly surrounded by barking dogs and running children.

Between the shore and the black rock hills, there’s a cluster of clapboard houses with bright-painted roofs. The contrast is startling after two weeks in the ice, where everything was a shade of white and blue.

Sasha hangs near the back of the little group. He likes it here in the Arctic; everyone is bundled head to toe against the wind. No one ever sees his left arm. No one ever looks at him funny for wearing gloves, even indoors. He doesn't like the cold, but he likes that.

Under the children’s cheers and shrieks, he can hear the hum of a diesel generator in the distance, where a cluster of clapboard houses with bright-painted roofs shelter in the lee of a hill. There’s a little runway, there, on the other side of the houses.

Off to the side, the other villagers speak through an interpreter. Sasha listens with casual interest. They’re sharing greetings and news, comparing the number of whales migrating this year to the number of whales that migrated last year. It’ll be an hour, at least, before they get to anything useful.

The tribal language isn't one he's heard before, but they're right on top of the world, where distant places come together.

"You speak Russian?" he asks.

"Of course," the man replies.

"Fabulous.” He slides the bit of metal from his right pocket. “Can you take me where you found this?"

The man gives him directions. It isn't completely straightforward. The words he uses for the landmarks are half-Russian and half-Inuit; there aren’t words in Russian for what he needs to describe. But with those two languages and a scattered handful of Quebecois French, the general outline becomes clear: three hours south on the snowmobile, where the sea cuts in again towards the hills, there's a stretch of ice which collapsed at the start of last season. The ice there rolls in against the hills in winter, like slow waves, and when it recedes in the summer, it scrapes away some of the hill. He found this at the base of the cliff last August. He hasn’t been back since. The ice shifts, yes, but it’s still early in the season.

Sasha looks to Natasha.

He doesn't know what it is he needs to prove.

He's never seen the _Valkyrie_. Supposedly, he was dead before that mission, and there weren't any pictures in the library. Either they're classified, or they never existed.

But the slender edge of metal in his gloved hands looks so familiar.

The man who made this, he thinks, made his arm. And the man who brought it down, he owes a debt.

 

###

 

Natasha turns back to the crowd on the beach, to see who might notice them missing if they go, and stumbles. The second team of ethnologists has joined them, now, and with them is the doctor. There, across the village, hood thrown back, dark hair turned now nearly white, is Dr. Albright. Their doctor. _A doctor isn’t such an easy thing to get_ , Reyes said. They greet him smiles and hands clapped on his shoulder. He always did know how to be friendly.

Sasha, keeping pace at her side, glances over sharply. She doesn’t stumble. The last time she stumbled was when he shot her.

Albright has spotted them, and is coming their way across the beach. He looks older. There’s a scar at his temple which wasn’t there before.

He wasn’t on her manifest. What was it she had asked JARVIS for, exactly? A list of all current crew aboard the _Maria Stark_? The AI had complied. It wasn’t his fault Dr. Albright was already ashore.

“Hello, Natalie,” he says, when he’s close enough to be sure she can hear him, but far enough from the cluster of whale researchers to be sure they won’t be overheard.

For the space between one heartbeat and the next, she feels sixteen again. Trapped and afraid, too numbed to the sensation to even fully recognize it for what it is. But that moment passes swiftly enough, and anger rises to take its place, welling up like blood from a deep wound.

This is a tidy little snare they’ve woven. The doctor keeps himself carefully within sight of three people. When she moves, he moves. They’re far enough from the crowd not to be overheard, but not so far that she could pull him away without anyone noticing. He’s not stupid. If they get him alone they’ll kill him, and he knows it. Natasha can see the speck of fear in his eyes.

She knows what it’ll look like if she kills the doctor here. She knows who they’ll side with. Everyone. Even Reyes. Yet she has no leverage to draw him away.

He keeps his hands in the pockets of his parka and she guesses he has a gun there. But he won’t shoot, either, unless provoked.

“Why are you here?” she asks.

“We thought it best to send someone you knew, but I’m afraid that list has grown rather short. And I asked for this assignment. You bring me in; I bring you in. It has a nice symmetry.” His thin lips curve up into a smile, but his eyes never leave Natasha’s face. “Do you know what happened after that summer? You did your job so well. I went right where you wanted, did exactly what they told me to do. But then they told my wife. Did you know that? They showed her pictures. Now she won’t speak to me. I haven’t seen my daughter in six years.”

He pauses, takes a few breaths to collect himself.

“The higher ups admire what you’re doing here. Five years completely off the grid, until that stunt in Monaco. We’re all impressed. But I’m here to bring you home. You can keep the Soldier with you,” the doctor offers, like its a concession, like this is a business negotiation. “I can see you’ve become quite _attached_."

Beside her, Sasha cocks his head. “Just you?” he asks.

“Oh, I have all backup I need,” Dr. Albright says. He looks at Sasha when he says it.

And Sasha laughs, like suddenly there’s no problem. “Let’s go,” Sasha says to her. He ignores Dr. Albright entirely. “He won’t follow. You’ll shoot him and I’ll shove the body down a crack in the ice if he tries.”

“What about—”

“He’s got no backup,” Sasha says gruffly. He turns, and he walks away.

Oh.

Natasha sees the outline of the plan, then. The runway, the bait. The beady certainty in the doctor’s eye. They were going to make Sasha do it. Shoot her, stuff her in the plane, whatever. The details are unimportant. This fourth attempt at escape would have ended as ignominiously as the first three, although the resulting file might have been a bit longer; she isn’t sure what exactly they think she’s been doing these past five years.

But they aren’t alone anymore.

Dr. Albright sputters. He shouts after them, loud enough that Natasha is sure they can hear him down on the beach. But he doesn’t follow them. “Wait!” he shouts. “ _Hold! Down!”_

His Russian is atrocious.

Sasha just keeps walking. He doesn’t look back. “Doesn’t work like that anymore,” he calls over his shoulder.

Natasha does look back. She can’t help it. She sees the exact moment when Dr. Albright when he realizes that he can’t turn Sasha. He can’t bribe her; he can’t frighten her. He has nothing she wants, and nothing she fears. He has no power over either of them. He’s the one who’s trapped.

She looks out at the knot of villagers and researchers, who have progressed to charts, now, at the roving children and dogs still running up and down the beach, basking in the excitement of the arrival of strangers, at the _Marie_ bobbing in the open harbor.

“What do we do with him?” she asks.

“Us? Nothing.”

Sasha takes out his shiny new Starkphone. It takes him a minute to find the contacts, but when he does there is exactly one number preprogrammed. He taps out a text message, painfully slowly, fumbling into the emoji keys before recovering. He presses send.

The phone buzzes with an incoming call only seconds later.

“Stark,” Sasha says when he answers, “We need you. Bring a team. And I need you to fire Dr. Albright.”

She can just barely hear Tony’s side of the conversation. “What? Who? Why?”

“Natasha says so.”

“Hand him the phone.”

Dr. Albright flinches back when Sasha approaches, but he takes the phone, delicately, when Sasha hands it to him. Their hands don’t touch. He holds it up to his ear.

“You’re fired,” Tony says. “Get your things. Get off my boat.”

“I have a contract!” he protests. “You don’t have the authority—”

“Authority?” Tony sounds incredulous. “I have more money than God, you little pissant. I can do whatever I want. Hand the phone back.”

Reyes is coming up the slope now, winding her way towards them. She’s on the phone herself, and she looks grim. Dr. Albright looks at her beseechingly., but her eyes are cold. She nods along with whoever it is on the other end of the line. “Stark is inbound,” she says, when she draws close enough to be heard.

“You can’t just—” Dr. Albright squawks, but Reyes cuts him off.

“He’s the boss,” she says. Then, to Sasha and Natasha, “Go on. I’ll babysit.”

Sasha nods his thanks, and takes Natasha by the hand, pulls her away. “Where are we going?” she asks.

“I owe a soldier a real burial,” he says.

 

###

 

They come to what feels like the edge of the world. There's the ridge, just like the man said, and there, just where the ice breaks at its base, is a dark-winged shape that can't be anything but a plane.

The _Valykrie_ shimmers just below the surface, one wingtip just cresting to the surface amid a tumble of rock from the cliff face. It’s too deep to be seen from above, too shadowed by the rocky cliff to pick out on satellite imagery.

The plane must have come down on top, onto the rock. If she’d come down anywhere on the ice, she’d have broken through. But the ice is coming for her, grinding away at the rock where she rests. Another winter, maybe two, and it will have her.

This would be a decent spot for an ambush, if there was a sniper on the ridge.

Sasha walks ahead, threading his way carefully between fallen rocks. Natasha picks her way along behind him.

There's a hatch visible near the tip of the wing, through a layer of ice no thicker than his outstretched arm.

Sasha trots back to the snowmobile and returns with an ice pick and a pair of shovels.

"Well," Natasha murmurs. "At least we don't have to worry about running out of daylight."

They chip away at the ice. It's rough going, but super soldier strength is good for a few things. Natasha takes a turn.

Finally, they reach the hatch. It's rusty, but it opens when Sasha yanks on it with his metal arm. The sound echoes away inside, but the echo is muffled. It's like tapping a spoon against the inside of a pot swaddled in blankets. It sounds like the facility in Siberia, with its endless hallways carved into the mountain.

Natasha is smaller, and more nimble, and this hatch was designed for maintenance, not for access. She worms through and down into the belly of the plane. She slides through the hatch and into the belly of the plane. She's gone a minute, then two, and just before she knows Sasha will start to worry she pops her head back out. "It's clear," she says. "I'll be a tight squeeze, but I think you can fit."

He leaves the parka on the snow and slithers after her, down through the wing and out into the space beyond, which opens before him like a cathedral. The air is silent, still. They wander through wreckage, moving deeper into the cliff. His footfalls grow more muffled. At the front of the plane is a wide cockpit, the front windows of latticed glass are shattered and warped. In the beam of Sasha’s flashlight, the ice through the windows glows almost as blue as the sky.

There's a console there, and a form collapsed across it. A body. The only one they've passed.

Natasha stands aside.

Sasha stares down at the body of Steve Rogers, Captain America, and waits to feel something. Anything. But the man on the other side of the wall—Bucky Barnes—is silent.

Sasha has crashed a plane or two in his time and walked away. But this man wasn't dressed for winter in the Arctic. He lies slumped over the console, although there's no signs of trauma. He looks like he just stopped. Like he gave up and laid down to die. And that isn't fair. It isn't fair that Steve got to rest and Bucky had to soldier on for seventy years, just to find him like this.

Sasha takes off his gloves. The cold hits him then, but it’s bearable without the wind. He unclips the helmet under the chin. The movement is familiar in a way that the face, the uniform, this whole situation is not. The helmet slides away and there is Steve Roger's face.

Sasha’s breath comes fast. He braces like he would for impact, for the force of a whole lifetime he’s forgotten to come barreling back to him. But there's nothing. Nothing more than that feel of that helmet strap between his hands, at least. He brushes his hand over Steve's furrowed brow, the ice-dusted cheeks. None of it means anything.

"I need some air," Sasha says.

He brushes past Natasha's arm and back out through the wing of the plane.

The _Valkyrie_ is a beautiful plane. He shouldn’t think so—she was made for an evil purpose—but he feels a twinge of regret as he grabs their bags from the snowmobile and begins to lay out the charges they didn’t need in Monaco: the C4, the remote-detonation grenades.

 

###

 

Natasha watches him go. He doesn't look like he's had any great epiphany. But she's nervous. She's not sure she's done the right thing, bringing him here. Confronting all this from his past. Natasha steps closer. She gazes down at Captain America's prone form. He looks so much like Sasha. The Sasha she remembers from her long ago visits to the room where they kept the Soldier frozen, deep in the mountain.

Is it possible—?

She's read the reports on Sasha's experimentation. There wasn't anything in particular they did when they froze him. Most of the space in the files had been devoted to detailing what it took to get him out of that suspended state.

The situation was far less controlled here, but the serum given to Captain America sounded like it had been more potent than whatever they’d used on Sasha. Of course, those books were written by Americans. They'd want the American scientists to look good. But it might also be true.

Natasha uses one grenade to blow a bigger hole in the side of the plane and drags the body out as carefully as she can. She lays it out on Sasha’s discarded parka, which she thinks rather proves her point.

Sasha finishes the job. The Valkyrie slips below the waves.

It’s not forever, just for now. They have a thread to pull, a world to make safe before she can surface again.

 

The crew finds them there at the edge of the blast radius and the rest of the day is a blur of helicopters and medics and too many questions from angry archeologists. Natasha doesn’t look up until a hand shoves a food bar in her face.

“Eat this,” says Tony.

 

Natasha glares up at him. “Ice. Fishing.” Every word is an accusation.

Tony throws his hands up. “I went with my dad every summer,” he says. “It was the most boring thing imaginable. Miles and miles of nothing. And it’s in international waters. Do you know how tricky it can be to arrange extradition from a Liberian-flagged ship in Canada’s autonomous territories, even for capital crimes? My attorneys would have had you wrapped up in paperwork for years.”

“Next time you drop us into a job,” she says, “I want more intel.”

He grins at her. He hears the promise in _next time_.

“For the record, I didn’t know about Dr. Albright.” Tony shrugs. “About the plane—I hoped. We needed a diversion. Some bright shiny thing to make a good distraction. I thought the _Valkyrie_ was the best choice. Though I must say, you’ve exceeded all my expectations. If you were my employee, I’d give you a raise. Captain America. Good God. Do you know the Department of Defense is practically shitting themselves with joy? All sins forgiven. If we spin this right, you might get a parade.”

“And Barnes?” she asks.

“What?” Tony looks genuinely confused. God, she hates being right sometimes.

Tony points to the gurney as it flashes by, headed towards the helicopter. They’ve got the body cocooned in some sort of device with tubes and wires and blinking lights. She can’t tell if it’s supposed to warm him up or keep him cool. “That,” Tony says, “is Steven Grant Rogers, Captain America.”

“And that,” she says, pointing to Sasha, who trails along behind the gurney, “is James Buchanan Barnes.”

“Huh,” Tony says. He cocks his head at Sasha. “You know, I think you might be right.”

He recovers fast, though.

“Well, come on, there’s room for two more,” Tony says, and once again Natasha sets her life aside and gets in a vehicle with Tony Stark. As the helicopter lurches up and away from the _Maria_ ’s wide deck, Sasha at her side, Natasha thinks maybe it gets easier with practice.

 

Coming in is not as bad as she’d imagined it would be, at least not at first. Mostly, they’re surrounded by Army doctors who look at Steve Rogers, Captain America, and see the Nobel prize dangling once more before their eyes. If they notice Sasha at all, the familiarity of his face supersedes suspicion. They have before them one long-dead war hero, why not two?

There are meetings. Endless meetings, held in high places where neither Natasha nor Sasha are allowed to go. That’s fine. They stay with Steve. Or, Sasha stays with Steve and Natasha stays with Sasha. At dawn on the third day, a decision is reached: they’re going to see if they can wake him up.

Once the decision is reached, a balding man in a suit perfectly tailored to hide any number of weapons comes to escort Sasha to see a stylist.

“We would like Captain Rogers to wake up surrounded only by familiar things,” the man says, when he explains why she must wait outside. “He will be reintroduced to the world in stages.”

Natasha suspects that she knows more about _reintroduction_ than whoever this man is, but she can bide her time. She follows along.

 

The stylist is a petite woman. She looks up at Sasha through thick dark glasses, circling like a hawk, and Natasha is pretty sure she's the first person to really see him, besides Natasha herself, in the last three days. She sends him to shave and dresses, and he plays along.

"It's not period," the stylist says when she reaches his hair, lifting one long lock of hair.

" _I'm_ period, lady. I think that's good enough," he grumbles.

She frowns, but relents at least far enough to allow him tie his hair back in a club at the base of his neck after she's smeared some foul-scented oil through it and slicked it back straight.

When she finally releases him, the man in the suit—“Agent Coulson, ma’am”— ushers them into a warehouse across the street. It’s an old studio soundstage. When the door closes behind them, the bustle of midtown falls away like it never existed.

 

###

 

Sasha is as gentle as he can be when he pushes open the door to SHIELD’s mock hospital, but the wall still rattles a bit. He goes and sits in the cane chair by Steve’s bedside, hitching up his trousers as he does. They said this was the uniform he used to wear. SHIELD sent a courier to the Smithsonian to pick it up. Sasha hates it. He feels like the glove in one of those laboratory boxes, that scientists use to manipulate objects in sealed environments.

But somewhere in all this mess is at least one pocket of crooked agents and Sasha isn't going to let them get their hands on Steve Rogers. Not even if he has to become Bucky Barnes to do it.

Steve sleeps. They've got him off the machines now and he's breathing on his own, easy inhale and exhale. The only other sound is the whirring motor of the fan they've installed to make the curtains billow out so prettily from the fake window with its fake view of fake traffic.

Sasha could tell someone about the fan. He doesn't remember this New York, but he doesn’t think it will fool Steve for a second longer than Sasha himself will.

“I’m pretty sure you can’t hear me right now,” he says. “Some people say they can hear everything around you when you’re in a coma;not that you’re in a coma, the words the doctors are throwing around out there have a lot more syllables than that. But I could never hear a damn thing, and I doubt you can either.

“You’re gonna wake up and things are gonna to be a bit different. They don’t want me to tell you that. They want me to be the guy who wore this uniform, and I can’t do that, not exactly. But they showed me your old uniform, too, and I’m guessing you can’t be either. There’ll be some new people you want to meet. Another Stark.”

He thinks of the slides they showed him in the briefing, all the questions they imagined Rogers might ask when he wakes, and their circumspect, psychologist-approved answers. There were photos, too. Agent Peggy Carter, founder of SHIELD. “Another redhead. I think you’ll like her. I sure do.”

Natasha is right outside. He can feel her behind him, just on the other side of the wall, guarding his back. For the moment, at least, they're safe.

Sasha slides a book from his pocket, opens it, and begins to read. He lets himself drift through this New York that never was and out into the world between the pages of _Eugene Onegin_. There isn’t any Thai translation; he thinks someone ought to do something about that.

He waits beside the hospital bed for Steve Rogers to wake up, and something about that feels downright familiar.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's done!
> 
> Thank you, dear reader, for joining me on this (long, long, much longer than expected) journey.
> 
> I hope you enjoyed the illustrations by the wonderfully talented (and wonderfully patient) potofsoup.

**Author's Note:**

> Epigraph from _To Vyazemsky_ , by Alexander Pushkin.


End file.
